DRSM Documentation Live demo Downloads
Updated October 2026

DataReel System Monitor

DRSM watches the connectivity and health of your servers, workstations and cloud hosts. Checks are small BASH plugins, alerts go out by email and text, and a fast Web dashboard shows the state of every host at a glance.

Open the live demo Install DRSM What's new
The DRSM Overview page for all sites: a red banner saying 11 hosts need attention, counts of healthy, warning, error and not reporting hosts, a table of sites, a Needs attention list and group checks.
The Overview page from the live demo, which runs on made up sample hosts.

What DRSM does

Connectivity

Ping, HTTP, HTTPS (with certificate checks) and FTP probes from the monitor host. Cloud hosts that block ping are checked with an SSH login.

System health

CPU (including cloud steal time), load, memory and swap, disk space and inodes, software and hardware RAID, network errors, and logged in users.

Plugins

Every check is a folder with a manifest and one BASH script. Add your own check without touching a core script.

Situational awareness

Overview, heat map, hosts and connectivity pages, on desktop, phone and NOC wall screen, in light or dark.

Alerts

Email and email to text alerts, throttled to one per problem every 4 hours, with the business impact in each message.

Organizations and sites

Customers and offices on one dashboard: an Organizations page with a heat map per site, a site picker, per site alerts, several monitor hosts feeding one dashboard, and logins limited to their own sites.

Tiers and site links

DEV, QA and OPS tiers with a tier filter and per tier alert addresses, and a Site links menu with nested submenus for each site's own tools and runbooks.

Databases

MySQL and Postgres backup, statistics and maintenance scripts, with stored credentials for unattended runs.

How it works

DRSM runs from cron on one monitor host. bin/drsm_run.sh reads one file per host from etc/hosts, probes each host from the outside, and runs the host's plugins on it in a single SSH session. It writes plain text reports and a status.json per host. The Web dashboard reads those files, and errors go out as email and text alerts.

How DRSM works: the monitor host runs drsm_run.sh from cron, probes hosts from outside, runs plugins on hosts over SSH, and writes reports that the Web dashboard reads. Monitor host workstation, server or cluster node cron → bin/drsm_run.sh plugins/ · etc/hosts/ text_email_alert.sh Linux hosts servers, VMs, cloud servers ~/drsm_agent/ cpu, load, memory, users, disk, raid, nics plugins Services checked from outside ping HTTP, HTTPS, FTP Reports $REPORTdir/systems/<host>/ Web dashboard Apache + PHP, local or hosted Email and text alerts, 4 hour throttle SSH probes report files, status.json read alerts

Nothing needs to be installed on a monitored host except a user account with keyed SSH access. The plugins are copied over on the first run and only again when they change.

What's new

DRSM had a full code review and several feature updates in October 2026. See What's new for the details.

Code review and modernization

More than 30 monitoring and security fixes, RHEL 10, Debian, Ubuntu, PHP 8 and cloud server support.

Plugin module system

drsm_run.sh, the plugin contract, host files, and a migration tool from systems.dat.

Dashboard redesign

Situational awareness Overview, heat map with status icons, host reports with gauges, and a Web only package for shared hosting.

Organizations and sites

Organization > site > tier > host, an Organizations page with a heat map per site, scoped logins, DEV, QA and OPS tiers, and site links.

Deployment setups

DRSM runs anywhere there is BASH and SSH. Two setups are in use today and are described step by step in Deployment setups:

Production cluster

DRSM on a 3 node cluster, checks run once from the active node, dashboard served by the cluster.

Workstation and hosted dashboard

DRSM on a workstation, with the dashboard on the datareel.com website (HostGator) for OSA and OCA.

Other documentation

These pages cover the same ground as the text files that ship with DRSM. The text files stay the reference you can read on a server without a browser:

Maintaining DRSM with AI assistants

DRSM ships guides for GitHub Copilot, Gemini, Claude and other AI coding assistants, so an admin can ask one to add a host, write a plugin or change the dashboard and get changes that follow the DRSM rules. The source has AGENTS.md, read by most assistants, with .github/copilot-instructions.md, GEMINI.md and CLAUDE.md pointing to it, and llms.txt as an index.

AGENTS.md

Layout, report format, coding rules, tests and releases.

Maintain a site

Hosts, plugin settings, sites, links, alerts, cron, upgrades, and why a host is red.

Write a plugin

The manifest, the script, the helpers and the rules for a new check.

Change the dashboard

Settings, reports from your own scripts, menu items, styles and PHP page rules.

All of them in one file to paste into a chat: llms-full.txt.

How to connect GitHub Copilot, Gemini and Claude to an install: AI assistants. Everyday jobs: Day-to-day admin.