Use inotify when you need efficient, fine-grained, asynchronous monitoring of Linux file system events. Use it for user-space monitoring for security, performance, or other purposes.

Inotify is a Linux® feature that monitors file system operations, such as read, write, and create. Inotify is reactive, surprisingly simple to use, and far more efficient than, say, busy polling from a cron job. Learn how to integrate inotify into your own applications, and discover a set of command-line tools you can use to further automate system administration.

Pandora FMS is a performance & availability monitoring system, ready for big environments. It uses agents for local monitoring and can do several kinds of remote network monitoring. Agents works on Linux, Windows, AIX, HP-UX, Solaris and BSD systems.

Pandora FMS (for Pandora Flexible Monitoring System) is software solution for monitoring. Pandora FMS allows monitoring in a visual way the status and performance of several parameters from different operating systems, servers, applications and hardware systems such as firewalls, proxies, databases, web servers or routers.

ZABBIX is an enterprise-class distributed monitoring solution designed to monitor and track performance and availability of network servers, devices, and other IT resources. It supports distributed and Web-based monitoring, auto-discovery, real-time monitoring, SLA assurance, trending, and more.

To keep your system in optimum shape, you need to be able to monitor it closely. [...] In this chapter, we look at some of the basic monitoring tools, along with some tactics designed to keep your system up longer. Some of the monitoring tools cover network connectivity, memory, and hard drive usage, but all should find a place in your sysadmin toolkit.

When it comes to monitoring your Linux system, few tools can rival Conky. This lightweight system monitoring utility can help you to keep an eye on virtually any aspect of your system, and it offers a huge list of options to choose from. But this flexibility comes at a price: all Conky's settings are stored in the .conkyrc file, which you have to create and tweak manually.

Most Linux users are familiar with the top command. Top shows you a list of processes on your system and provides a ton of useful information such as their CPU usage and owner. Unfortunately, this isn’t always enough data and many people don’t know where to turn next.

Multitail improves on the well-known and useful program tail, adding colors and multiple-file monitoring. Juliet Kemp offers some great tips on using this excellent file-monitoring utility.