seafelt has been undergoing private testing for several months to fine tune the featureset for the 2.0 release. The test base has now been expanded to include a wider range of people for a more vigorous round of testing. We look forward to a flurry of complaints about how badly the software works and the wide variety of features that it doesn't have.

The software can be downloaded from http://www.seafelt.com/software/, or alternately via Debian or Ubuntu APT package managers with the following lines in /etc/apt/sources.list:

dpkg http://www.seafelt.com/software binary/
deb-src http://www.seafelt.com/software sources/

seafelt currently consists of two main components: the seafelt backend and the seafelt frontend.

The seafelt Backend

The seafelt backend is an SNMP monitoring system integrated with a PostgreSQL database for data storage. Features include:

• An extensible discovery engine, capable of auto-detecting device types and discovering all the devices in your network, or just one.
• A highly scalable polling engine, capable of monitoring thousands of individual elements from your desktop PC.
  
• Highly configurable discovery and polling.

The seafelt Frontend

The seafelt frontend is what makes seafelt really shine. Using the power of Zope and Plone, it provides a powerfully configurable reporting engine capable of providing table and chart reports for data collected by the seafelt backend. Major features include:

• A modular, highly configurable reporting engine.
• A flexible grouping system, allowing database defined groups or groups of your own devising, including groups of groups.
• A write once, use anywhere reference system, eliminating rework.
• Any set of reports can be collected together to form a MultiReport. Even other MultiReports!
  
• Supports multiple databases simultaneously.
  

The seafelt frontend allows you to create reports for any database compatible with Zope, not just seafelt. You can combine reports together to create single page, dashboard style reports, even if the reports are from different databases. You can easily create a report of your DSL server's CPU utilisation and bandwidth usage for the past 24 hours, together with what MythTV recorded during that time.

More To Come

We've only just started with what seafelt can do. We think seafelt can transform the way you manage your network and we look forward to hearing what you think seafelt can do for you.