If you want to to basic monitoring with salt, it is possible with the check_services salt states, and some modules already availables (disk.percent , test.ping).
The main advantage of this solution is to have a very brief information about the state of your servers pool (the minions) in a single web page with a system of green/red color:
- disk usage (percentage, red if >90% ),
- server state,
- service state.
### Warnings
- This is not 'real' time monitoring just a reporting system !
- Real time monitoring with salt should be done using salt mine. Then, add salt reactor, if you want alerts.
- You may also consider using salt-monitor.
- Finally, do not forget to add a true monitoring solution to complete this (e.g. see ganglia states).
Once these warnings said, you could use some files here to create json files regularly (see check_salt_json.cron.bash file) and the php code to display the results. This means that you need a web server on your salt master with php enabled.
Disk usage display:
It is quite similar for services and server's status.
The cron script creates daily json files in /var/www/html/exports/YYYYMM/YYYYMMDD_type_of_export.json
You could change this behaviour, by adding hours, minutes, seconds to the filename. However, you will have to change the way you retrieve data in the php file (add a panel to choose the time (example)).
If you want you could also add a mail alert manually by adding a daily cron (or more frequently if you changed the periodicity). You could achieve this either with a jsawk* script combined with mail command or by parsing directly the content of your json files manually (also combined with mail command):
grep 'false' /var/www/html/exports/`date '+%Y%m'`/`date '+%Y%m%d'`_hosts_status.json
grep -B5 -A4 'false' /var/www/html/exports/`date '+%Y%m'`/`date '+%Y%m%d'`_services.json(*) e.g. :
cat /var/www/html/exports/`date '+%Y%m'`/`date '+%Y%m%d'`_hosts_status.json |jsawk 'return this.myhost'