Mintr:

A la carte - node by node monitoring.

Mintr is a simple, Node.JS based a la carte monitoring solution that allows for a single cluster node to be monitored in passing with almost zero configurations.

Node.JS is a very simple, but powerful web development language that takes advantage of Google Chrome's JavaScript runtime libraries. Node.JS is event based which makes it excellent for monitoring functions in the browser through a hosted, dynamic app page.

Installing Mintr is also very simple via the usage of an efficient initialization script. Since Mintr is written to implement Node.JS it requires Node.JS to be installed on the system. This is not difficult although it does require NPM to be installed rather than using the YUM (default RHEL package manager) call upon installation.

Mintr is incredibly handy for checking some basic statistics of a machine in question: mainly CPU usage and RAM usage as well as a timeline for those usage statistics. One advantage of Mintr over going to the full Zabbix dashboard is that it allows for non-sudo information to be shared and it also allows for quicker data retrieval from the server. Mintr's output is sanitized and updates in realtime, making it excellent for quick browsing of node performance.

This is all of the relevant information that Mintr supplies which is why it is excellent. Zabbix can provide an overwhelming wealth of information but in some cases, especially during quick tests, it is easiest to get a simple and elegant graph of just the information that is needed - usually CPU and RAM. This is especially helpful when running quickly on a hypervisor with multiple guest VM nodes to see how each node is impacting overall system performance.

Mintr can easily be disabled with a pkill operation when it is no longer desired to be run from the server.