spmonitor provides a general monitoring and administrative tool for the Spread system. The spmonitor program can send queries and commands to Spread daemons to either gather debugging or performance statistics, or to shut down specific daemons or change flow control parameters of the system to tune performance.

The spmonitor works by sending UDP packets to the Spread daemon, so if network losses occur, commands or status reports can be lost. It can also lose reports when monitoring a large number of daemons.

The default config file location. /etc/spread.conf is also searched if a local file is not found. Spmonitor must load the spread.conf file in order to opperate.

Some details about the effective use of the spmonitor program are contained in the Users Guide which is available from the Spread web site www.spread.org.