I recently faced the requirement of monitoring resources for a Bluehost-hosted account using the open source, python-based monitoring platform Zenoss. Seems like a simple enough requirement, and eventually was, but Bluehost’s shared, locked-down model makes it a bit more challenging.

What typically makes Zenoss so easy to use is it’s reliance on SNMP for agentless monitoring. The most difficult part is configuring SNMP on the client, but once that is done (and typically once you have it configured, you can reuse that configuration on most of your other servers), Zenoss really does make the rest of the work easy. Read more… Monitoring Bluehost with Zenoss

I got a wild hair and have been trying to determine the best way to go about parsing java thread dumps with python. After a few failed attempts, I came across the pyparsing python module. Pyparsing is a fairly simple to use (considering what it is doing) parsing module, that makes quick work out of cryptic log files…

I was trying to parse a typical java thread dump, like this one, “web81.prod.dump”:

Read more… Parsing log files with python and the pyparsing module