It is worthwhile to have tools to analyze system state to help report problems, whether with hardware, security, or configuration in general.
This is helpful even if the tool provides no ability to directly help fix a problem. For instance, S.M.A.R.T. has no ability to fix a failing disk drive. But if it at least makes you aware that the drive is failing, that may allow you to back things up and start looking to fix it before anything disastrous happens.
Note that the Multiplexing Configuration Managers tend to include state analysis tools...
Formerly known as SATAN, this was built as an "expert system" that analyzes how permeable a particular host is...
A security scanner tool for networked computer systems
SYSMAN - A System Management Substrate for Common Lisp
A library for Common Lisp that uses SNMP to request status information from remote devices.
Maintains centralized log data using Perl, MySQL™, Apache, PHP.
The interesting bit is that text strings are treated much like Lisp "interned symbols," so that they only occur once in the database.
Open Challenge - System Configuration Collector
System Configuration Collector is yet another configuration collector. Just like the other collectors it collects configuration data on Unix systems. The difference is that each line of collected data is extended with a hierarchical classification of the nature of the data and with an indicator that states whether that data is supposed to be static or dynamic.
Spong - Systems and Network Monitoring
Spong is a simple systems and network monitoring package written in Perl . It can currently run on major Unix and Unix-like operating systems.
This is a "system monitor" system that allows "plugging in" your own scripts or compiled programs to monitor services or statuses specific to your environment.
For instance, if you are running databases on multiple hosts, you might write a script that checks connectivity. If you are running " application servers", you might write programs to do some sort of "health check".
This is a fork of the open source Nagios codebase, created by a community that found that the owners of the Nagios trademark were reluctant to accept patches (see Why the Icinga Fork), and community involvement was being lost.
Centralized syslog-ng to MySQL™ (and PostgreSQL and Oracle)