Simple Monitoring

Sometimes you just need a simple monitor to verify when machines and protocols go down. Enter nefu from University of Michigan. It is a simple compiled program that generates syslog and html reports from simple pings and port tests. You can point it at a bunch of nodes on the network and give it dependencies and it magically keeps track of everything.

I like it because it gives me a report that allows me in a matter of seconds to diagnose a number of potential problems.