RedAlert: A scalable system for application monitoring

RedAlert is a complete application monitoring system which consists of a stateful server daemon and extensible Perl client API. Almost any IP-protocol service is a candidate for RedAlert monitoring: the clients determine what error condition they have discovered, convert that information into a standard message format, and transmit the Alert to the server. RedAlert therefore will easily plug in to existing script-based monitoring environments, providing greatly increased functionality for a minimal investment in configuration time. This functionality includes volume tracking, interval sampling, threshold-based notifications, and reporting mechanisms which include pager, electronic mail, and SNMP traps. We have chosen to focus on email monitoring, specifically postmaster bounce mail, for the scope of this paper. Bounce mail is both ubiquitous and complicated, making it ideal for RedAlert monitoring.