Gossips is a monitor for systems and services. It helps you to manage a large IT - system by perfoming test over your distributed system. The software its self is a distributet client/server - architecture whereas the server oversees the clients and oneself. To control the monitor I provide a commandline-interface. With different commands you can get informations on the running gossips clients and on the configuration for your IT enviroment. To get an idea how gossips works read the following sections.

Gossips is a tool that gives you the possibility to write your own tests in perl. The internal structure of gossips is divided into two entities (Modules) which take care of different tasks. One type of entities are called 'probes' and do the 'measurments' on the system (like in electronics). Entities of the type 'test' analyze these measurments. Probes log their measurings in history files so that a test is able to analyze them. A test can correlate the information from different Probes to decide what the state of the system is. E.g. Probes for web-server, ping and http-server can improve the analysis of your system when they are combined into one test.

Gossips does not show the state of you system in red and green lights. Gossips has no levels where gossips tells you: this message is critical and the other is not. Gossips tells you only about the changes of states and it is on you to decide if this is important or not. When you have the impression, that you become to much e-mails from a Test, then maybe you want to redefine its states. If you really want red and green lights, then you can always write a Test for it :-)

When something seems wrong gossips reacts fast and reports the system change to the server. Another property is that it will be silent as fast as it told you a system 'demage' even if the trouble is (still) there, gossips will be silent. It informs you when something seems wrong and does it only once (if you want). The same information told twice isn't interesting any more. With the help of a knowledge base you have the possibility to build a strong environment for your work as system manager. Besause can rely on your own knowledge that you taught gossips by filling out errorfiles containing the knowledge base.

• when you know your system well.
  
• you want to test complicated things, like you do with scripts now, but don't want to care about the informing (mailing) of the persons and the execution frequency of your scripts.
  

• you don't know the system that you want to monitor.