The check is in the (e)Mail(s)

This time on PING, Philip Paeps from the FreeBSD Cluster Administrators and Security teams discusses their approach to systems monitoring and measurement.

Its eMail.

“Short podcast” you say, but no, there’s a wealth of war-stories and “why” to explore in this episode.

We caught up at the APNIC57/APRICOT meeting held in Bangkok in February of 2024. Philip has a wealth of experience in systems management and security and a long history of participation in the free software movement. So his ongoing of support of email as a fundamental measure of system health isn’t a random decision, it’s based on experience.

Mail may not seem like the obvious go-to for a measurement podcast, but Philip makes a strong case that it’s one of the best tools available for a high-trust measure of how systems are performing, and in the first and second order derivative can indicate aspects of velocity and rate of change of mail flows, indicative of the continuance or change in the underlying systems issues.

Philip has good examples of how Mail from the FreeBSD cluster systems indicates different aspects of systems health. Network delays, disk issues. He’s realistic that there are other tools in the armoury, especially the Nagios and Zabbix systems which are deployed in parallel. But from time to time, the first best indication of trouble emerges from a review of the behaviour of email.

A delightfully simple, and robust approach to systems monitoring can emerge from use of the fundamental tools which are part of your core distribution.