The Peep architecture is a producer/consumer architecture where the clients are producers and the servers consumers. Clients are meant to be distributed around the network, scanning for information at the source. Upon discovery of an event, the client sends off the appropriate information to its respective server(s) and the server(s) represent that data accordingly. A simple example scenario would be a single peepd server running on a centralized server and a monitoring system that monitors logs on three different machines. All three monitoring clients report their events to the server. Events can be distinguished by the sounds they play or even stereo location. The server has no concept of which client is which. It simply represents the raw network event data as it receives it. This scenario can easily be expanded to include multiple servers or many more clients, each scanning for different types of information on each machine. Because the sounds used come from natural environments, sound configurations are not limited by musical or harmonic combinations and are as ''scalable'' as your what your ear can handle.
All servers and clients are configured using the same configuration file, peep.conf. The configuration file includes sections containing information specific to each client as well as the ''class'' or group of servers that it belongs to. It also contains a list of events and state sounds (See section 3.2). Mangement of clients and servers is made easier through autodiscovery and leasing. Clients are meant to be run as daemons on the respective hosts they monitor and bind with servers automatically. Because all configuration information is stored in a single configuration file, the file can be pushed around to each monitored host on the network and changes made centrally.
Sounds provided with Peep are organized into different themes and categories. Each theme contains four categories: events, coupled events, state sounds, and heartbeat sounds. The current most complete theme is a ''wetlands'' venue, and we're trying to organize several sound themes to offer a wide variety of sounds to better meet diverse tastes. The goal of Peep is to provide you with continual network status information while remaining pleasing to the ear. The Peep server is very flexible in how it represents sounds, so I suggest playing around with the sounds until you find a configuration that's comfortable for you. And when you do, please share that configuration file with others to ease their setup process. As of the 0.5.x series of Peep, a new XML theme format exists to allow for easy interchanging of system setups among various networks. Now, Peep can easily be configured to match another customized enviroment by simply loading the theme file. So please send your system themes and configurations my way via email at: mgilfix@eecs.tufts.edu.
Network monitoring with Peep is based on the idea that humans find it very easy to discern changes from the norm, discern what sounds right, and to discern singular important sounds from a collection of many sounds. This concept of ''normalcy'' allows you to diagnosis your network based on the feel of the sound ambiance. In other words, things are normal when ''Peep sounds like it did yesterday''.