Network / Server monitoring software

murdatapes

Board,

It's been awhile. Hope everybody is well. Wanted to see if you guys know a good network server monitoring software you have a experience with?

thanks in advance

forkvoid

I've deployed two instances of Microsoft System Center Essentials. It's fairly good. I've also worked with Nagios extensively, and it's great, but requires Linux knowledge to get going fully, and it's kind of a PITA on setup.

SteveO86

I've got SolarWinds NPM in environment, mainly for my networking equipment. It also watches my servers.

NPM doesn't keep track of services on the servers however.

I think SolarWinds and What's Up Gold are the big names.

CSCOnoob

We used to run Concord eHealth but was replaced with EMC Smarts (now known as IONIX).

We still use SNMPc. Was also good for monitoring and checking quick stats for old DIUs (Digital Indoor Unit) for VSAT.

For server side, I believe we use Foglight. Though, I think EMC Smarts is also capable of doing server monitoring for the application side of things?

aordal

I run Whats Up Gold in our environment and I find that it works really well. Fairly easy to use and very robust. I monitor services, resources and machines themselves. I'd recommend it.

rsutton

I like and use Cacti. I get alerts and graphs emailed to me when thresholds are met.

phoeneous

rsutton wrote: »

I like and use Cacti. I get alerts and graphs emailed to me when thresholds are met.

Cacti is most awesome.

msteinhilber

Depending on the desire features, how much time you want to put into it, skill level, etc... there's a lot of options out there.

I've tried a good variety over the years and will share some of them.

If you're looking for something that is easier to get rolled out and monitoring (in my opinion at least), then you might look at something like Zenoss, GroundWork Open Source, or Zabbix.

If you're looking for something more modular/tweakable, something you can fine tune easier if you're willing to invest the time and research, and something with a larger community to back it then I would look into Nagios or Cacti or a combo of each.

Lately I prefer Zenoss or Zabbix because they cover my needs best with minimal effort on my part. I used to run a combo of Nagios and Cacti and could do more with it but it took a lot more time for me to setup and maintain. Since my time is spread so thin at work now, I prefer the easy route even if I have to sacrifice some features.

phoeneous

msteinhilber wrote: »

If you're looking for something that is easier to get rolled out and monitoring (in my opinion at least), then you might look at something like Zenoss, GroundWork Open Source, or Zabbix.

Never heard of Zabbix until now. Looks good, I might try it this weekend. How many hosts are you monitoring and what platform do you have it on?

Chris:/*

Groundworks Open Source

Outstanding out of the box and using Nagios/Nagvis you can get great visualization. It is highly customizable as well.

msteinhilber

phoeneous wrote: »

Never heard of Zabbix until now. Looks good, I might try it this weekend. How many hosts are you monitoring and what platform do you have it on?

It's been scaled back from where it was, but it's presently keeping tabs on around 500 hosts. Overall it's recording data for a bit over 150k items/triggers (ports, e-mail queues, hdd space, memory usage, cpu usage, etc) polling at 60 second intervals (for most items). Run's on a pretty basic whitebox server (Q6600, 8GB RAM, mirrored 80gb for the OS, 1tb raid5 for data) running CentOS 4. Hold's up pretty well for the most part considering the server it's on being relatively basic with the number of hosts and items it's checking. It did take quite a bit of tweaking of the Zabbix config files and even more tweaking to MySQL to get it to work well. It's likely it will need to be upgraded soon though as we're approaching a point where we are going to be adding more checks soon.

phoeneous

msteinhilber wrote: »

It's been scaled back from where it was, but it's presently keeping tabs on around 500 hosts. Overall it's recording data for a bit over 150k items/triggers (ports, e-mail queues, hdd space, memory usage, cpu usage, etc) polling at 60 second intervals (for most items). Run's on a pretty basic whitebox server (Q6600, 8GB RAM, mirrored 80gb for the OS, 1tb raid5 for data) running CentOS 4. Hold's up pretty well for the most part considering the server it's on being relatively basic with the number of hosts and items it's checking. It did take quite a bit of tweaking of the Zabbix config files and even more tweaking to MySQL to get it to work well. It's likely it will need to be upgraded soon though as we're approaching a point where we are going to be adding more checks soon.

I installed the 1.8.3 appliance version on my vmware server 2.0 box today. Boy that was fun... It might just be me, but Zabbix is far from user friendly. The templates, items, triggers, actions, conditions get confusing. We are getting a new esxi box soon so I'll have CentOS running instead of using the appliance.

Essendon

I'll chime in too, we use PRTG Network Monitor, made by Paessler. The product is full-on, monitoring anything from disk space to bandwidth to event logging to Application and SLA monitoring. The templates, actions and triggers can take a little while to understand but once you know 'em, it's all good.

The vendor offers a free trial here if anyone's interested.

solvedata

murdatapes wrote: »

Board,

It's been awhile. Hope everybody is well. Wanted to see if you guys know a good network server monitoring software you have a experience with?

thanks in advance

Here's one i recommend - eG Enterprise Application Monitoring | Server Monitoring | Virtual Machine Monitor

crrussell3

We use Advanced Hostmonitor here at work. Does the job, but I would rather deploy Nagios or something along those lines (if I knew enough about *nix)

Advanced Network Monitoring - HostMonitor

vCole

Zenoss & Cacti here.

However, I have used WhatsUpGold, Zabbix and Nagios.Wasn't too impressed with them. I do like Zenoss and Cacti though.

RobertKaucher

I have used Nagios and Zabbix. Zabbix was pretty cool, but I found it easier to customize Nagios. Don't ask me why...

forkvoid saying it is a PITA is really understating things.

vCole wrote: »

Zenoss & Cacti here.

However, I have used WhatsUpGold, Zabbix and Nagios.Wasn't too impressed with them. I do like Zenoss and Cacti though.

So, are all the cool kids changing their names? Maybe I should....

I could officially become BOBBY_TABLES

xkcd: Exploits of a Mom