salmon

A multi-server monitoring system built on top of Salt using Django.

It can serve both as an alerting system like monit and a monitoring system like munin (using Graphite's whisper database).

It aims to be simpler, easier to setup, and more efficient than its predecessors by taking advantage of Salt for data gathering and transport.

Installation

It's expected that you'll run this on the same server as the Salt master, however it is also possible to run on a host capable of SSHing to the master.

To bootstrap the project:

virtualenv salmon
source salmon/bin/activate
pip install salmon
salmon init
salmon upgrade
salmon collectstatic

Fire up the web server with:

salmon start

Now create a config file for your checks. There is a commented example in the repo. Store this in the same directory as your conf.py file (default: ~/.salmon/checks.yaml).

Once you have your checks defined, you can run manage.py run_checks periodically with cron and view the status at http://localhost:9000.

Configuring Salt

For security reasons, you shouldn't run this as root on your server. Instead, use (or create) a less privileged user and modify your Salt master config to only provide access to the specific functions it needs to check. For example, you could create /etc/salt/master.d/monitor_acl.conf with the following contents:

client_acl:
  youruser:
    - '*':
      - test.ping
      - service.status
      - disk.usage
      - 'ps.*'
      - file.check_hash

Be sure to restart the salt-master for configuration changes to take effect. For more details, read the docs on Salt's client_acl.