Server monitoring Software

I am looking for some advice on a piece of software based on your experiences...

I have approx 30 servers I have to monitor. On these servers runs various Services, applications, and scheduled tasks.

I need a program that can monitor if a service stops, an application dies, or scheduled tasks dont work. Added bonuses would be if it could monitor hardware as well or anything else that might be of use to me. If one of these does stop I want it to email me and txt my cell phone (could be done through email as well)

I currently have Whats up gold and insight manager.

Whats up gold doesnt allow for custom services and all in all I am not happy with it, Insight manager isnt bad but doesnt work as well as I would like it to nor does it work on all my servers.

Any help would be appreciated

hi guys,

Quote:

---

I am looking for some advice on a piece of software based on your experiences...

---

I will recommend nagios as it is open source and i have a good experience with it.

Quote:

---

I have approx 30 servers I have to monitor. On these servers runs various Services, applications, and scheduled tasks.

---

Yes, nagios will work for you.
- You can monitor individual services and you can write your own plugins.
- It can mail the current status of the machine after specific interval.
- It has a nice front end which helps a lot, showing graphs and statistics.
According to there site,

Quote:

---

Nagios has a lot of features, making it a very powerful monitoring tool. Some of the major features are listed below:

* Monitoring of network services (SMTP, POP3, HTTP, NNTP, PING, etc.)
* Monitoring of host resources (processor load, disk and memory usage, running processes, log files, etc.)
* Monitoring of environmental factors such as temperature
* Simple plugin design that allows users to easily develop their own host and service checks
* Ability to define network host hierarchy, allowing detection of and distinction between hosts that are down and those that are unreachable
* Contact notifications when service or host problems occur and get resolved (via email, pager, or other user-defined method)
* Optional escalation of host and service notifications to different contact groups
* Ability to define event handlers to be run during service or host events for proactive problem resolution
* Support for implementing redundant and distributed monitoring servers
* External command interface that allows on-the-fly modifications to be made to the monitoring and notification behavior through the use of event handlers, the web interface, and third-party applications
* Retention of host and service status across program restarts
* Scheduled downtime for supressing host and service notifications during periods of planned outages
* Ability to acknowlege problems via the web interface
* Web interface for viewing current network status, notification and problem history, log file, etc.
* Simple authorization scheme that allows you restrict what users can see and do from the web interface

---

http://www.nagios.org/about/

The main problem i faced was initial configuration of nagios. It becomes very easy when you have properly defined the hosts, services, service groups etc.

Thanks

Quote:

---

Originally posted here by mmkhan
hi guys,


I will recommend nagios as it is open source and i have a good experience with it.


Yes, nagios will work for you.
- You can monitor individual services and you can write your own plugins.
- It can mail the current status of the machine after specific interval.
- It has a nice front end which helps a lot, showing graphs and statistics.
According to there site,

http://www.nagios.org/about/

The main problem i faced was initial configuration of nagios. It becomes very easy when you have properly defined the hosts, services, service groups etc.

Thanks

---

I concur.

Well ... I concur with mmkhan to...but if you're looking for a more expensive solution you could check out Microsofts MOM 2005 - LINK

It's especially useful when you have a Microsoft environment, but it can (with third party plugins) be used to monitor Unix or Linux systems too ...as well as it can be used to monitor Cisco and 3Com equipment (and other brands to, but all with third party plugins) .
I've implemented it for a big international firm and they are very happy with it.

It can monitor services, eventlogs, hardware, mailflow (exchange), SQL databases etc...
It provides reporting through SQL reporting tools, which can deliver detailed reports on failures or network usage through email or on shares daily or hourly or whatever.
It provides a extended knowledgebase allready incorporated which gives you vallant information on the problem or incident reported in the operator console.

It uses Webconsoles which provide a non admin access to the console so easy to give access to a coworker who just needs to monitor.

it provides possibilities to send emails, paging etc...
You can write custom rules and scripts to monitor custom applications... I wrote a custom rule to monitor RFID entries in the eventlog because the packet to monitor the SAP environment wasn't yet available then.

There are numerous possibilities that can be done with MOM 2005 ..but there is also room for improvement ...that's why SP1 for MOM 2005 has allready been made available... but if this product keeps evolving the way it does it will make a product to watch for in the future.


Just thought I mention it :D

C.