panorama9 or centrastage any users

hargi

hargi

hargi

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19 Jul 2006
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Anybody use any of these?

I am having a little play about with them, they look useful and some of the monitoring is good and allows you to program some actions in the case of an alert and some let you deploy software.
However I don't know if the pricing is to much for what it really is?

I can use remote utilities to remote on to my servers at work for free, I can then use remote desktop to get on any pc from there. I'm happy using GPP to install software. The only real thing I'm missing is the monitoring and actions.

I'm only on site for part of the week so been proactive is a good thing. And its normally only one bit of software that causes a big problem that either calls for it restarting or worst case a server reboot. So maybe this is a bit overkill.

Or do people really want a fully managed service?
 
I remember looking at Centrastage a while back.

We purchased PRTG almost two years ago and it's an essential tool for us now. It's helped track down some obscure problems and the developers keep producing new features. They've recently released a Python based probe which runs on a Raspberry Pi and is fab for simple monitoring (ping, SNMP) of remote sites which don't have a suitable Windows host for their full remote probe.
 
We use PRTG for our monitoring but we are just purchasing Centrastage after trialling it for 30 days. It seems like a good tool to use and we will primarily using this software as an auditing tool for our sister company and our clients. This won't be replacing PRTG though which will stay as our primary monitoring tool.

It may cost per desktop but the amount of time and money this could save us if utilised correctly is worth it.

We may also use it to deploy program updates and patches etc.
 
May I ask what you monitor with PRTG?

At the moment I'm employed to be on site 2.5 days a week on 2 different sites. Usually I get phonecalls when I'm not there that a certain bit of software has crashed and no one can log onto the network. I then remote in and restart it or restart the server and everythings fine. Would PRTG allow me to be a bit more proactive in this?
 
We monitor from two "directions".

Our core server runs from our rack space in a datacentre and probes on that monitor availability from a public perspective ie router pinging, website responding, inbound SMTP alive etc.

We then have remote probes inside customer networks which check individual servers for disk space, services running, graphing bandwidth for Internet connections, hardware status etc. They feed back to the central server so we have a single interface for all the data.

You can setup PRTG to e-mail notifications when certain conditions occur. They also have a Android / iPhone apps so you can quickly see any sensors which are down.
 
BTW, the latest version of PRTG (needs .Net 4) will run 30 sensors free so it's worth giving a go - I would say it's easy to get going with but as you play, you quickly find extra sensors and good ways to use them.

For instance, we run a mail server for some customers and I wanted to monitor the size of the retry queue (a mailbox got compromised and a load of spam sent which was a PITA to sort).

The mail server software can't alert me on queue size, so I use PRTG's File Count sensor. I've configured it to warn us if the file count in the Retry folder increases past value X and to go to a full alert if higher than Y.
 
Thank you. I think I have done this wrong as i was just having a play with it. Have installed it on my work pc onsite and got some sensors going. However should I have installed this on my office pc and then used remote sensors to the work server.
Does that make sense?
 
Running from your PC would be fine if you are monitoring servers within that network.

You would normally use the remote probe to gather data from another network (ie another physical location).
 
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