ESM (Extensible System Monitor) is a program that lets you tie together plugins to monitor your system. For instance if you want to be emailed whenever a harddrive fails you could use the included ESMSysLog monitor and it will notify you of any emerg syslog messages, such as a harddrive failure. If you then decide you also want to know if TripWire detects anything you can use another monitor that reports on TripWire. If you want to know if the load on your system suddenly goes up you can do that too. ESM will get the results of all of these monitors, make a system report and then send that report with a sender. All of this is done automatically, so you can get some work done.

Writing plugins for ESM is very easy. All a plugin is is just any executable program that communicates with ESM via standard input and output. You can make a plugin with just about anything, shell scripts, perl programs, c, c++ etc.

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