Server monitoring

ChrisD.

ChrisD.

ChrisD.

Man of Honour
Joined
20 Sep 2006
Posts
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Hi all, looking for a small application that can do the following:

  • Monitor disk sizes
  • Do reg queries
  • Check services
  • Check cisco router/switc configs/logs
  • Trawl Solaris and report back logs

Some other bits as well.

Currently use a host of perl scripts which output to a basic webpage, but it's not very pretty. I would like to use a small, lightweight application to do some if not all of the above. Something that is free and licences for use is preferable. Any recommendations?
 
One of the many Nagios variants will be your best option; I work for Opsview and we have a free version (core) but there are a lot of 'free' ones like.. Nagios Core, Icinga, Shinken, Op5, etc.
 
Just so happens that is what I was looking at, will test it out in my testing environment and see how I get on. Cheers.

Do they work via snmp?
 
Generally depends on what your monitoring - you can use an agent like NSclient/NRPE or you can use 'agentless', like SNMP or WMI (Windows agentless). Agents generally give you the ability to do more, as you basically connect to an agent and tell it to run something - so you can have a custom script on the server you want to monitor, i.e. check_backupexec - and your monitoring tool calls the agent, agent runs the local script, script checks backup, then passes the results back to your monitoring tool - whereas agentless just take what its given via WMI or the MIB.
 
I'd recommend PRTG. You can get a license for 30 sensors free if you stick a "Monitored By" logo on a webpage.

We have a license for 1000 sensors with about 600 in use so far.
 
Problem is that I would really want something to sit on a local machine/server and then probe boxes, without using agents, so snmp would be preferential, or something that can go into registry remotely and look for what I define.
 
Do mean for each site you have one install which can then monitor other machines / switches / devices?

PRTG fits that nicely. Our central server is in a DC and on each network we install the PRTG probe onto a server. From there we can monitor as much as we want eg hardware status, switch traffic etc through SNMP, WMI etc
 
Another person using PRTG, we are in the process of doing our head office at 2500 sensors, but we could easily double it for global monitoring.

Netflow stats are also good from our firewalls
 
We use BMC Patrol globally (mix of VC Monitoring and Agents), but that's probably overkill for what you need, PRTG is also good with some good options and a friendly interface :)
 
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