Linspector is a software for monitoring the vital information of hosts, services and devices in a network.
The history of Linspector is long. It was in early 2005 when Johannes Findeisen thought about creating a network protocol for collecting vital information from servers. At that time a good friend, Thilo Bangert, and Johannes where a lot in contact because of the Linux operating system which both of them had used for a long time. It was Thilo who told Johannes about Linux in 1999 and from that day Johannes felt in love with that great piece of software.
Thilo and Johannes created a draft of a network protocol for system monitoring called SVIP. Thilo wrote a small daemon for getting data from hosts which implemented the SVIP definition. They had limited spare time for development at that time so they never finished that project.
Johannes worked in many companies as system engineer so the problem of system monitoring in an easy way was always in mind. Nagios was used in many web infrastructures but mostly this service was outsourced because the companies didn't wanted to do this maintenance task. It is not easy to find good system engineers in Germany so it is much harder to find an employee with UNIX and Nagios skills. Companies are therefore buying very expensive software solutions for system monitoring which are not open source.
In the year 2010 Johannes met Rafael Timmerberg because both where working at the same company in Hamburg, Germany. Rafael and Johannes started hacking on electronics stuff using microcontrollers once a week and became good friends. Since Rafael is a very excellent software developer Johannes told him about his long time thoughts about a new approach of system monitoring. Rafael loved the idea and they started development the same evening and decided to do that using a scripting language to make Linspector easy to extend.
Johannes needed to move away from Hamburg in 2011 so development was frozen and the project seemed to be dead. But, it isn't dead! In early 2013 development was continued and a very nice implementation of the idea was created by using the Python programming language.
Our goal was to create a software that everybody understands, everybody could extend, has a simple configuration and that runs natively on most modern operating systems. The base of that idea was born and development is going on - not very fast but we are on it.
The logo was made using The GIMP. It is made from a Tux image created by Larry Ewing merged with an inspector hat icon from the RRZE icon set.