Cloud based monitoring

[anything I don't mind]

Does anyone monitor multiple sites from one centralized location? If so what do you use for this. I am hoping/looking to set up a centralized monitoring solution across six different sites. It does need to be very advanced but basic monitoring and email notification for issues. Currently use a combination of monitoring solutions at the different sites. We don't realy want to install a monitoring node at each site as then we will have to maintain them all at the same time etc. This is why we were looking at a cloud based monitoring.

The only one i have come across at this point is GFI. Anyone used it before? http://www.gfi.com/cloud-it-management

Any other recommendations or opinions, should we just setup a server at our head office and monitor them all from there, instead of cloud based? IF so which monitoring solutions is best for multiple sites and clients. I currently use prtg but there multi client and site licenses are too expensive.

 

[Hulkster]

Are these internal or customer sites, do they all talk to eachother?

If it's internal with decent WAN Links between all sites then you can do this at one site really

PRTG is a great product and I rate it highly

OpsView is worth a look, and they have a cloud version: http://www.opsview.com/technology/downloads/opsview-core/opsview-core-demand

If you're a Linux guy or like getting your hands dirty then take a look at Nagios and it's vast amount of plugins

What are the core features you need?

 

[elrasho]

Meraki and Solarwinds will do it

 

[anything I don't mind]

Thanks for help. What i mean by cloud monitoring is a hosted monitoring services. Rather than a monitoring application that monitors a private cloud.

I basically just want alerts via email for critical issues with servers and services across multiple clients. What I would like to avoid possibly is having to install a server monitoring node at each client and open firewall ports and then have to host a monitoring application at our head office.

edit: I found this website http://www.rackaid.com/resources/server-monitoring-cloud/

Busy trying to get a quote from nimsoft.

 

[Kona*]

• Opsview On-Demand (Core is free, you need to paid for an Amazon EC2 instance though)
• GFI MAX RemoteManagement (paid monthly on a per-device basis, very good granular monitoring)
• Panorama9 (paid monthly on a per-device basis, cheaper than GFI however your unable to set your own monitor thresholds)

Just a few to consider

Edit: The reports I've had from some of our customers at work is that Nimsoft isn't exactly great, however I don't have any personal experience with it.

 

[5tephen]

I use LogMeIn for this. Great system. It gives remote access obviously, but a not-so-well-known feature is its Alerts, you can set the agent to pick up event log errors matching a specific ID and category, a drive letter falling below a certain threshold of free space, memory usage exceeding x% for say 4 hrs, a service stopping.

The event logs are handy for monitoring backup failures, or disk errors, I have exchange and backup services set to flag an alert when they stop, I have a couple of clients that have a POP3 connector which frequently fell over and it was handy for that. You can have the alert emailed to you or just flagged up on the dashboard. Assigning a server to the existing alert category is just a matter of configuring it via your LogMeIn page, you don't need to go near the server itself.

I'm not sure if that's as broad a range as you require but for preventative maintenance, I do very little digging on individual customers' servers now that I have all the alert thresholds set up. Been using the alerts feature for a number of years now.

 

[anything I don't mind]

I have quotes from nimsoft and opsview, just GFI to do next and i will checkout panorama9 as well, thanks for the link.

We use gotoassist for remote access but ill look in to logmein as well.

 

[101001101]

Zabbix, its free for one thing and the latest version is excellent.

You can run the frontend at HQ with all the fancy alerts, graphs, screens etc are and at the cloud end all you need is an appropriate server to install the proxies.

The proxies allow you to execute scripts / commands on the systems you want to monitor and should the WAN go down between proxy and frontend system, the proxy will buffer the data to disk until the WAN comes back up.

Its really cool and I highly recommend it.

 

[BoomAM]

Im using the demo of this at the moment:
http://mobilepcmonitor.com/

Quite impressed upto now, seems designed for windows from the offset.

 

[G.O.A.T]

Are these internal or customer sites, do they all talk to eachother?

If it's internal with decent WAN Links between all sites then you can do this at one site really

PRTG is a great product and I rate it highly

OpsView is worth a look, and they have a cloud version: http://www.opsview.com/technology/downloads/opsview-core/opsview-core-demand

If you're a Linux guy or like getting your hands dirty then take a look at Nagios and it's vast amount of plugins

What are the core features you need?

I would second the choice of PRTG, very simple to setup and use but still powerful. It also comes with the ability to use remote probes (installed on a windows machine per site) which you might find useful in your situation.

 

[NightShadow]

We use Centrastage:

http://www.centrastage.com/

Seems to work OK and allow remote acces via 2 methods, email reports etc. Can sign up for a free account to monitor 3 machines as a test aswell.