Ixor Station Monitor Utility (Win32/Linux/Java)

Latest Update: May 25th 2006. (Station Monitor 1.03 - NSClient Password Bug Corrected).

We created this simple program in order to be able to view the status of the machines in our render cluster via VNC and Nsclient (nagios) protocols, like in the screen shot below.

• You can add and remove monitored machines using the 'Configure' button.

• Clicking on the IP addresses of each machine brings up a VNC remote desktop window.

• Clicking on any of the meters brings up a history graph for the past hour for the given meter.

• If you hover the mouse over anything you will get extra information.

• If disk I/O takes a long time, a counter appears next to the machine's 'led' and shows how long this has been going on. We found this helpful in checking for memory overflows where there is swap thrashing.

• 'High' implies 'over 85%' for any column.

Download

For the monitored machines (win32):
In order to monitor machines, you need to have the VNC and nsclient services on them. If you don't know how to do this, please download this file which has the two bundled with a one-step install script. You can unzip this file on the desktop of the target machine and run the install script.

For your workstation (Java, win32, Linux):
There are 3 packages below: one for windows, one for Linux, and a Java jar for any other OS.

Binary Jar:
A standalone jar file which you can run if you have Java installed. It is only about 100k, hence quick to download and try out.
Download it from here. (0.1 Mb)

Win32 Installer:
This is the utility packaged in a windows installer and compiled as an .exe file. Fast, and no Java runtime is needed.
Download it from here. (15 Mb)

Linux Binary Tarball:
This tbz2 file contains a binary compiled version of the utility. Fast, and no Java runtime needed. Just untar it somewhere and run the file 'station-monitor'.
Download it from here. (24 Mb)

Source Jar:
The (rather messy :)) source (including the modified VNC source, but excluding the nsclient4j library which we used unmodified) for this program is available here, as per the requirement of the GPL license. The original works are available here (vnc) and here (nsclient4j).