IT Monitoring Tools

fieldmonkey

I was wondering if anyone knew of any Open Source IT Monitoring software?

What I would like to achieve is to have nodes send heartbeats or pulse checks back to a server relative to hardware and software health, report any errors, faults or overheating. I have been fantasizing about starting a repair business that also provides managed services, but I would like to build this up in a lab first to experiment.

For right now its just nights and weekends, nothing hardcore so obviously I don't have the funds etc...

forkvoid

I've had fair luck with Nagios. It can be time-consuming on initial setup. It took me several days to get one up and going for just basic stuff. I've seen one working at full-throttle, and it's pretty sweet.

SrSysAdmin

It's not open source, but I use Woodstone's ServersAlive.


It's not free but it's pretty close to it. I think we paid like 300 bucks for it and use it to monitor more than 30 servers plus printers, workstations, everything you could imagine, with over 1,000 checks spread out to systems in NYC, Cali, DC, etc.


Check it out, I'm happy with it.

dadaji

Try SpiceWorks. Its pretty good. And its FREE.

Ahriakin

Opsview is based on Nagios, but much easier to install and maintain through a GUI (though you can drop down the CLI if you prefer old sk00l configuration and granularity).

seuss_ssues

forkvoid wrote: »

I've had fair luck with Nagios. It can be time-consuming on initial setup. It took me several days to get one up and going for just basic stuff. I've seen one working at full-throttle, and it's pretty sweet.

It doesnt really get much better than Nagios.

phoeneous

dadaji wrote: »

Try SpiceWorks. Its pretty good. And its FREE.

Ugh, I hate Spiceworks.

Nagios and Cacti have always been win for me.

msteinhilber

I've used Nagios, Cacti, Zabbix, and Zenoss Core and have been happy with all of them in various scenarios.

Spiceworks I have tried on several occasions and it's just not for me, might be great for fairly small environments but I wouldn't run it for anything other than that.

akp982

dadaji wrote: »

Try SpiceWorks. Its pretty good. And its FREE.

Second for Spiceworks, Its a great product and very easy to use and setup.
I have it currently monitoring 3 diffrent locations very accurately and reliabaly.
But if you are looking for a tool with a wider range of alerts then i would suggest checking out nagios. Spiceworks may however be helpful on the helpdesk side?

phoeneous wrote: »

Ugh, I hate Spiceworks.
Nagios and Cacti have always been win for me.

Out of intrest what did you not like about Spiceworks? Did you checkout the community? the guys there always seem helpful if you get stuck.

ConstantlyLearning

We use both nagios and opsview in work. Standalone installs of nagios and a master/slave install of opsview. Seems to work pretty well except for some connection issues in the opsview master/slave setup.

Hyper-Me

Spiceworks, Nagios, OpenNMS.

Silentsoul

Spiceworks works great for small installs. we have over 50 server and over 1200 workstations. When it started to do inventory it just kind of froze after about 300 finds. I think it even says not for use with over 250 clients because of the slowdown it causes.
Once I got Nagios up and running with cacti, I wouldnt trade it for anything. I might test out a few other things. Whats up gold, zabbix but you really cannot beat nagios with a decent front end.

BradH

We have utilised Nagios in our Ops centre for many years now and it has worked nicely with no problems however we are looking to change this over to OpManager (ManageEngine) who have a ticket based system which intergrates into their monitoring solution. They also have another product which allows you to write customised SNMP queries to a log server which is then polled and if anything occurs it raises an alert which raises a ticket apparently (they are still working on getting it all working however once setup should be good)

Actually we use a few of their products. Their ADManager is brilliant. You can setup a template and have a end user exchange and all setup in as little as putting in their first name/last name and selecting save if you have it setup right.

So for open source Nagios is good, but it can lack in some features unfortunatally once you have a large company that needs the extra's.

fieldmonkey

Thanks for all the great responses. I just finished installing ubuntu and look forward to trying some of your suggestions.

That's after I installed the 244 updates!

phoeneous

akp982 wrote: »

Second for Spiceworks, Its a great product and very easy to use and setup.
I have it currently monitoring 3 diffrent locations very accurately and reliabaly.
But if you are looking for a tool with a wider range of alerts then i would suggest checking out nagios. Spiceworks may however be helpful on the helpdesk side?

Out of intrest what did you not like about Spiceworks? Did you checkout the community? the guys there always seem helpful if you get stuck.

I havent used it in years so I dont know if it has changed much since but the last time I tried it it was just too slow. Plus I didnt like the interface. But thats just me, it probably works great for others. Nagios and Cacti have never failed me once.

qcomer

phoeneous wrote: »

I havent used it in years so I dont know if it has changed much since but the last time I tried it it was just too slow. Plus I didnt like the interface. But thats just me, it probably works great for others. Nagios and Cacti have never failed me once.

I noticed the slowness too. Then, I ran the web interface on a different machine (not on the host machine) and it ran soooo much faster and pretty flawlessly.

We use Orion in our school district and used to also us InterMapper.

nel

Nagios or variations of it seem to be the way forward. I found nagios a tad difficult to initially setup.

arwes

I've tried out Opsview and Groundwork Open Source, and Groundwork seems to be a bit easier for me to wrap my mind around:

GroundWork Open Source IT Monitoring and Network Management Software

fieldmonkey

fieldmonkey wrote: »

Thanks for all the great responses. I just finished installing ubuntu and look forward to trying some of your suggestions.

That's after I installed the 244 updates!

I now have Ubuntu and Nagios running on my old Dell Inspiron 600

The quickstart guide had me up and running quick and was very fluent. It might have taken me an hour or so, but if I would have been more familiar with the editor commands and such, I could see someone installing this in 20 minutes easy. There's always a learning curve ~

Must now add a few windows clients laying around the house!

Thanks again!

Paule123

I like the looks of Spiceworks, seems to do everything we currently use Whats up Gold for