Server Monitoring Software

SwampThing

Anyone using any monitoring software out there - for monitoring the status of servers; are they up, is there anything in the event logs etc.
Ideally, I'd like a Windows & Linux compatible solution. One must-have is the ability to send SMS alerts.

Just like to see what options are out there. Thanks.

Kali

http://www.nagios.org

Don't bother looking anywhere else .. my installation monitors around 48 hosts and around 87 services, its notifications are extremely handy (although they require some tuning).. combine it with mrtg for some nice graphs and you've everything you need.

Kali

Oh if you really want SMS alerts (believe me I wouldn't), then external scripts such as o2sms can slot in easily into nagios' notifications (you can set it to a specific escalation as well.. i.e. only SMS on the first and tenth notifications).. etc.

mneylon

Although Nagios might be wonderful once you get it configured we prefer to use a commercial solution, as we can get support immediately if there is an issue.

de8o

I am going slightly OT.

Although Nagios might be wonderful once you get it configured we prefer to use a commercial solution, as we can get support immediately if there is an issue.

This really bugs me. We have countless commercial products with paid maintenance contracts. What is so great about being able to call these vendors and have them first fob you off, saying that you have a non standard setup, and then go on to say that the feature you are want to use isn't supported.

An example. We use Lotus Domino which we were uprading to 6. However there turned out to be a bug in 6 that caused our intranet to hang. After ploughing lots of time and money into it. It was eventaully narrowed down by a workmate and another non IBM person in a forum (the way you would expect to fix an open source product). Nearly 1 year later they have released a fix.

If we had been using an Open Source product, we could have firstly gotten our developers to look at the source code to see if anything stood out. If this didn't work and we really wanted a new feature we could put a bounty up (the money we would have wasted in support contracts) for somebody to code this.

I could go on and on about the advantages of Open Source, but I'll leave that for another thread.

All I'm trying to say, is just because you pay for support, it doesn't mean a lot.

mneylon

de8o - we use a lot of open source software and software that is based on open source technology, however it's really a question of how much you value your time.
Configuring and setting up Nagios to monitor several hundred devices takes a lot of time. Doing the same thing with a commercial product that is based on Nagios takes a fraction of the time.

de8o

Genuine Interest. What commercial products are based on Nagios and do you use any of them?

Kali

Blacknight.. I don't see any point in your post unless you are actually telling us the name of the frontend for nagios you use.

Anyway back on topic.. I forgot to mention Angel, which is quite handy if you only have a few (<dozen) hosts and no overly complicated services to monitor... very simplistic though. For bandwidth monitoring theres also cacti (check sourceforge) instead of (or in addition to) mrtg.

mneylon

Kali wrote:

Blacknight.. I don't see any point in your post unless you are actually telling us the name of the frontend for nagios you use.

Up.time (http://www.uptimesoftware.com)
It's not a frontend for Nagios. It's based on some of Nagios' code, though I'm not 100% sure how much of it.

de8o

Nagios is released under GPL. If there is any code from Nagios in uptime then uptime has to be released under GPL. If your statement is true that uptime contains code from Nagios then uptime is also GPL and Open Source.