user10501's questions

I need to set up a monitoring and alerting system for one of our business teams-- they're smart people, but not engineers or sysadmins. I basically need to do the same thing that happens for system monitoring, but with all application-specific metrics. I'll be writing all of the monitoring scripts myself.

I'm familiar with Nagios, and it's what we use in-house for our system-level stuff, but it's not the right fit for this problem. My needs:

• A clean and simple dashboard
• Alerting capabilities
• Graphs
• Obviously, the ability to write my own monitors

In other words, what's like Nagios but dumbed down?

I just added a new DNSBL to the list of ones that I use on my small mailserver. I set it up to be first on the list because I wanted to see what it missed but other lists caught.

I'm watching mail logs out of the corner of my eye while I do other things, just to make sure that things looked sane, and I started wondering about how to measure the relative effectiveness of various lists. I suppose I could give each list a week at the top of the heap and then measure how much the other lists catch that week, but that seems like a real hack.

Are there any tools or techniques for measuring the relative effectiveness of different blocklists on a specific server? I can measure false positives by user complaint volume, so my concern is addresses that one blocklist misses but another catches.