Spong Basics

Son of Pong (spong) is a simple system monitoring package, that will monitor system attributes and network services on a variety of machines. It will gather status reports and contact staff if there are problems. It will also summarize the information and display it via web interface (which is what you are using).

Systems and the status of the services provided by those hosts are summarized in a tables on the right of the screen. Hostnames make up the vertical axis of each table, and services make up the horizontal axis. For each row, and column of the table, if that service is running on that host, then a colored dot is located in that position. The color of the dot represents the status of that service. A green dot indicates that everything appears ok, a yellow dot indicates that there might be a problem, and a red dot indicates that there is a problem that requires attention.

Problems that require attention are summarized and listed in the column on the left of the screen. Information about each problem (such as the host, and service having the problem, the time that the problem occured, and the person to contact about the problem) is provided for each host that requires attention.

Help is provided by clicking the "Help" link on the main screen (which takes you to this page). You can also get additional information about each service by clicking on the service headings at the top of each table. If you click on the hostnames in the table, you will be taken to a screen which provides more detailed information about that host. A table of the services running on that host is listed at the top of the page, with the bottom of the page having two columns. The column on the left shows any host specific text that you supply. The column on the right shows the history of problems that have occured on that host.

If you click on any of the "dots" in the table, you will be taken to a page showing more detailed service information. At the top of the page shows detailed information that might be useful in diagnosing the problem, the bottom of the page shows the history of that service.


Nitty Gritty Details

If you are just a casual user of spong - someone who keeps track of the web page, or someone who reacts to problems reported by spong, then hopefully the above documentation is sufficient to your needs.

However, if you are someone who needs to install spong, or configure either the client thresholds, or the network services that should be monitored, then the following the link below to the full Spong documentation.


Written by Ed Hill (ed-hill@uiowa.edu)
and Stephen L Johnson (sjohnson@monsters.org).