Server Monitoring

[Kizz]

What's everyone doing for monitoring the likes of servers uptime/HD status, Database such as Oracle/SQL Server, website etc

I'm currently using Hobbit which is handy for all this but it's only good for internal use. Am seriously looking at Gridmon which is essentially a hosted/more advanced Hobbit.

Any other solutions worth looking at for a small company?

[stalin]

Now you can use 'nagios' in a search term on here, or the word 'monitoring'. read up on the threads and you can start to ask more specific questions.

nagios - http://www.nagios.org/

every man and his dog uses it, from big (telstra) to small (1 man bands)

[Gecko]

Nagios for alerts, Cacti for trends - been discussed many times over around here - and the answers haven't changed. Theres a few new ones out on the horizon that look good, but not good enough for me to put them into production yet.

[SirNemesis]

Kaseya.

[TehCamel]

im a big fan of nagios. i've just started installing it as a proof of concept at my new job.

got some fine tuning to do, but i'm hoping i can move ahead with it.

nagios will monitor sql and oracle, and ldap, and http, and ftp, and dig, and dns, and ping, and cpu, and disk, and uptime, and memory, and processes running, etc.

only issue is you might need a plugin installed on the windows servers

[bloodbob]

If you have IBM boxes look at IBM System Director too. ( You should have licences which come with the boxes)

[FiShy]

Originally Posted by bloodbob

If you have IBM boxes look at IBM System Director too. ( You should have licences which come with the boxes)

Single vendor products fail. you want somthing that does the whole network.


Another vote for nagios.

[bloodbob]

Originally Posted by FiShy

Single vendor products fail. you want somthing that does the whole network.

You should have looked up the products website first. You only need one X-Series ( you probably get licenses with blades and stuff as well ) and you get I think 20 or 50 licenses to run on non IBM boxes. He said small business I assume he doesn't have more than 20 servers.

Also on X-Series it does predict hardware failure and you can configure it to automatically lodge support requests.

[FiShy]

Originally Posted by bloodbob

You should have looked up the products website first. You only need one X-Series ( you probably get licenses with blades and stuff as well ) and you get I think 20 or 50 licenses to run on non IBM boxes. He said small business I assume he doesn't have more than 20 servers.

Also on X-Series it does predict hardware failure and you can configure it to automatically lodge support requests.

What about router and switches, access points? Its pointless monitoring your equipment if you dont monitor the hardware that inter connects it.

You probably get licenses and only need 1 X-series? Nagios is GPL2 last time i checked and you can use it on ANYTHING.

[memnoch]

My vote is still with nagios.

You can hack it up to do a lot more than any other single vendors product.
Or you can spend mega $$ to do the same thing.

You can do heaps with it.

Jabber notifications, on call roster rotations, two way SMS so you can ack stuff by sending a SMS. Custom checks for anything you want.

We check deltas for replication of LDAP/MySQL. LDAP auth, pop3 logins to ensure the whole stack is working (auth, disk & service etc), running process age (backup processes might be long running). We check for things we expect to be there, if they're not then it is an alert (database dump mtime of files) etc.

Pretty much you can do what ever you want with it, as long you have some basic bash, perl, ruby, python or random language of choice skills.

Now one thing is it not so great is for monitoring the insides of JVMs. If you are a Java shop you might be better off with something different that is targeted towards that.

Some things I have seen done is monitoring thread count, garbage collection info, memory usage, open file count etc. I just cant remember the name of the software for that.

[Jimoin]

We use Argent

[bloodbob]

Originally Posted by FiShy

What about router and switches, access points? Its pointless monitoring your equipment if you dont monitor the hardware that inter connects it.

Well A) there is an SDK and B) it monitors SNMP devices

You probably get licenses and only need 1 X-series? Nagios is GPL2 last time i checked and you can use it on ANYTHING.

With an X-Series server you get 1 server license and N ( 20 or 50 or something ) client licences. If you want more licenses you have to pay for them. You can use those licenses on anything. If you have IBM desktops they also come with a client license. If you go past 5000 clients you also have to pay more however we are talking about a small business here.

The OP can do whatever he likes.

[elvis]

Originally Posted by Gecko

Nagios for alerts, Cacti for trends

Ditto.

Last place I worked for was 30 locations. We used Nagios with around 3500 different checks - most standard, a few custom written (things like doing rowcounts on remote and local databases and comparing them to check how far out of whack replication was, etc).

Where I work currently it's all Nagios defaults (check disk, cpu, ram, services, etc)for checks. And Cacti plus Weathermap for trends.

[FiShy]

Originally Posted by bloodbob

Well A) there is an SDK and B) it monitors SNMP devices



With an X-Series server you get 1 server license and N ( 20 or 50 or something ) client licences. If you want more licenses you have to pay for them. You can use those licenses on anything. If you have IBM desktops they also come with a client license. If you go past 5000 clients you also have to pay more however we are talking about a small business here.

The OP can do whatever he likes.

Or using something like nagois where you don't need to buy a vendor specific hardware...

[bloodbob]

Originally Posted by FiShy

Or using something like nagois where you don't need to buy a vendor specific hardware...

Exactly what part of it will run on non IBM systems don't you understand?