Overview

This is a short guide containing the steps I took to install Sealion on an older Centos 5 server. Sealion is a activity monitoring service website that reports the status of your linux every 5 minutes. An agent running on your server runs a set of common commands (i.e. ps, top, vmstat, …) and reports the results back to the sealion.com site web console where you can view the results.  The Sealion introduction video says it all.

Installation Problems

The normal agent installation is usually a one line command but it failed on my server with this python dependency error:

Performing dependency check…
Error: Python dependency check failed
File “../bin/check_dependency.py”, line 19
except Exception as e:
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

The Sealion site didn’t list the dependencies and there weren’t any support documents that I could find. I emailed Sealion and they replied with a link to this article for installing Python 2.7 on RedHat or SUSE.

Installing Python 2.7 got me one step closer but failed during the make process for the sqlite module with the following error:

In function ‘_pysqlite_set_result’:
error: ‘sqlite3_int64’ undeclared

After some searching this article came up listing the error as a known bug in Python 2.7.3. I repeated the Python installation with 2.7.8 and substituted the correct Pthyon version into the agent installation curl command and all worked.

Complete Procedure

1. wget https://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.7.8/Python-2.7.8.tgz
2. tar -xvf Python-2.7.8.tgz
3. cd Python-2.7.8
4. ./configure
5. make
6. make install
7. curl -s https://agent.sealion.com | sudo bash /dev/stdin -o YOURSEALIONKEY -p /usr/local/bin/python2

   Tip: The -p parameter specifies which version of python to use. Substitute /usr/local/bin/python2 with the location your make install command placed Python and YOURSEALIONKEY with the user key obtained from the Sealion add server screen.

Note: As part of the troubleshooting process I updated sqlite but I’m not certain this was required. If you have problems try:

yum install sqlite.i386 sqlite-devel.i386

This installed and started the Sealion agent and after a few minutes server and server data appeared in my Sealion.com console.

Thoughts About Sealion

This is my first attempt at evaluating the Sealion linux server monitoring service. Other servers more up-to-date distributes installed the agent without issue.

The Sealion site is beautiful, functional, but a little sparse on content. There are only sporadic references to it across the internet (as of the time of writing) when I went searching for installation assistance. The lack of community activity leaves me a little worried about the reputation of Sealion but I can’t deny that the service is useful and easy to use. Their support email address responded quickly when I finally submitted my issue.

The service meets a need and has value to me. I hope to see it’s reputation increases and turn into a reasonably priced service.

Revision: 2014-07-04 Minor correction thanks to feedback from Team Sealion.