The Shepherd software package was created by a team of two undergraduate Computer Science students as a senior design project at Wentworth Institute of Technology. Shepherd aims to simplify the process of distributed resource monitoring in a transparent and simple manner. Shepherd includes software to run on both client nodes and a server computer, which will allow a systems administrator to monitor the health of all computers on the network. After a convenient server setup process, the user simply runs the node software on each computer they wish to monitor. The server software continually monitors these incoming data, such as CPU and RAM usage, and reports anomalous values to the administrator. Leveraging modern Python software libraries, Shepherd involves the use of efficient data structures, multiple system monitoring libraries, three ZeroMQ network architecture patterns, a variety of database tables, and dynamic plotting solutions. Once properly configured, this software allows clients to monitor network performance from a single interface and notifications, rather than active checking or retroactive diagnostics. Shepherd is made available free under the MIT License as a monitoring tool or basis for other software projects.
