Watchdog (System Monitoring) Component
The Watchdog component is a solution that ensures that your server is clean from malware, all services are up and running and there is enough free disk space on the server.
Watchdog can monitor the following services:
- Web server providing the control panel interface
- Web server providing WWW service to users’ sites
- SMTP Server (QMail)
- IMAP/POP3 Server (Courier-IMAP)
- DNS Server (BIND)
- Tomcat
- MySQL
- PostgreSQL
- SpamAssassin
- Plesk Premium antivirus
It can start, stop, and restart the services it monitors, and it can be configured to take actions depending on the stability of a service over some time period.
It can run other utilities and notify you when disk space usage has reached the specified amount.
For the purpose of monitoring services and disk space usage, Watchdog uses the monit utility. For information on the monit utility, visit the monit developers' website at http://www.tildeslash.com/monit/.
The Watchdog can scan the server file system for rootkits, backdoors, exploits, trojan horses and other malicious software on demand or on schedule. It can notify you by email of scanning results and show reports through the control panel. It updates its security knowledge base through the Internet before each scan.
For the purpose of scanning the server for malware, Watchdog uses the Rootkit Hunter utility. For information on Rootkit Hunter, visit the Rootkit Hunter developer's Web site at http://www.rootkit.nl.