Open source machine health monitor (status of disk, cpu, etc.)

Question

I'm looking for an open source solution to the problem of checking whether hardware components on a Ubuntu system need to be replaced. The checks will be run on every node in a cluster that is inside a customer's infrastructure.

I'm aware of some general service monitoring solutions, such as Nagios, but am interested in solutions to the more specific problem of checking hardware health. Such solutions could simply be existing plugins for an existing system (e.g., a Nagios plugin for checking disk and CPU health).

I realize I could try to implement this myself by querying things such as smart, temperature, errors, etc., but I don't want to reinvent the wheel, and since this seems like a general problem, I would expect an existing solution to be better than what I would come up with through trial and error.

Answer 1

A possible answer is stress. As I can see, it focuses mainly from the errors caused by overloading (burn-in tests).

Its CPU testing functionality is bad (doing sqrt()-s in infinite loops is anything but not a CPU test), but it is relatively okay for memory management and io tests.

Answer 2

I would handle this by applying a variety of nagios plugins. There are a wide variety that focus on specific hardware vendors. The nagios-plugins project provides a nice, maintained set of nagios plugins to start with.

If you are using AWS I'd suggest looking at Netflix's Conformity Monkey which says that it will:

Conformity Monkey determines whether an instance is nonconforming by applying a set of rules on it. If any of the rules determines that the instance is not conforming, the monkey sends an email notification to the owner of the instance. We provide a collection of conformity rules in the open sourced version that are currently used at Netflix and believed general enough to be used by most users. The design of Conformity Monkey also makes it simple to customize rules or to add new ones.