We have grown to the point that I can't keep my thumb on all the servers and sites so we're looking for monitoring software.

I've heard great things about Big Brother's deliverables but have heard it's an nightmare to get functioning properly.

All of our servers are running Redhat 7.2. What's your opinion, what do your companies prefer for monitoring software?

Thanks,
Jason

Do a search on the forums, and you should find plenty of opinions. I believe there was a thread about this a couple days ago.

-Dan

I have 2 things to say Demarc and Snort :D

www.demarc.com and www.snort.org

Excellent for monitoring servers in and out of the same location :D

Imran

Snort does not do any monitoring, does it? I thought it was a LW IDS system.

Hi,

I'm in the process of selecting monitoring software as well and came up with the list below:

http://www.empirix.com
http://www.aprisma.com
http://www.deepmetrix.com
http://bb4.com/
http://www.castlerock.com
http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/44/jump/ciscoworks.shtml
http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/cc/pd/cxsr/1105/
http://www.concord.com/solutions/spv/hosting.shtml
http://www.entuity.com/home.html
http://www.openview.hp.com/marketsegments/serviceproviders/index.asp
http://www.micromuse.com/products/nfsm_def.html
http://www.networkview.com/
http://www.netplex-tech.com/software/snips/
http://www.fidelia.com/solutions/nocol-faq.phtml
http://www.nortelnetworks.com/products/01/optivity/net_mgmt/index.html
http://www.observer-analyser.co.uk/
http://www.nortelnetworks.com/products/01/preside/prod_portfolio/multiservice.html
http://www.riversoft.com/
http://www.woodstone.nu/salive/
http://www.ipswitch.com/Products/network-management.html

Let me know what you've selected and if I've missed something!

Cheers,
DrAtomic

Most of that list is for network monitoring, not server monitoring. Not to mention probably far outside of the budget of any company who does not own their own fully staffed NOC.

-Dan

Dan (and others),

We are a commercial organisation looking for best of breed solutions, we start such a process by compiling a long list of possible solutions matching our criteria, any item on that list matches one or more of the following criteria:

- Performance info (connect time, return time, etc.)
- Availability monitoring (from network to single websites)
- Availability reporting (email, documents, etc.)
- Trend analisys
- Trend reporting
- Alerting (pager, sms, email, etc.)
- Multilevel reporting (ability to create reports such as SLA reports on a complete environment and/or single components)
- Webbased output (for use in control panel)
- Maintenance mode (the ability to put a system into maintenace mode so that no alerts are generated and or show up as dead but as being in maintenance).

Once we have made our selection out of the longlist we'll create a short list where we rate each app. on what it's supposed to do, pricing is a part of that but support is as well (for instance a freeware or opensource piece of software could score 10/10 on pricing (hence it's free) but 1/10 on support if no commercially available support is available but could still be selected if we've got sufficient knowledge in house to maintain it and resolve serious issues but if we don't have the knowledge it's more then probably out.).

All I did here was trying to help save someone a lot of time by providing him/her with the info we allready have (and hopefully save myself a bit of time by getting responses with monitoring software matching our criteria that I missed) and yes there are some network component monitoring pieces included in that list but if you're running multiple servers (like we are and he is) you'll also have your own switch(es) and firewalls to monitor and maintain when simply using a co-lo...

So, my question is what's this list missing and can our criteria be matched in a single package?

DrAtomic

You might want to take a look at http://tlcwe.com 's NetStatus Monitor at http://scripts.tlcwe.com/. It is a fairly simple PHP script but quite detailed for server monitoring. The one thing I am going to mess with is trying to get it to email my pager when somehting bad is going on.

It is worth a look and best of all it is FREE! Good Luck!

I would also highly recommend Demarc + snort it has so many features!! ;) ;)

DrAtomic,
Fair enough. As for a single package that can give you everything you want, I doubt it. I spent two years as doing enterprise management for a very large hosting company. We used several tools for monitoring our servers and network, and we were constantly evaluating others. I have yet to find the "total package". If all you are concerned with is network monitoring, I'd take a close look at Spectrum. I'd steer clear of both NOCOL and What's Up, unless they've changed drasticly, and you have a fairly small network (a couple hundred servers or less). You may also want to look into Unicenter TNG.

To the original poster, since no one seemed to take my hint, and continue to post to yet another post of the same thing... For a small company my vote goes to Netsaint, Demarc, or Big Brother.

-Dan

Does any body have a working demo of NetStatus Monitor I can check out ?

Originally posted by patmccroch
We have grown to the point that I can't keep my thumb on all the servers and sites so we're looking for monitoring software.

I've heard great things about Big Brother's deliverables but have heard it's an nightmare to get functioning properly.

All of our servers are running Redhat 7.2. What's your opinion, what do your companies prefer for monitoring software?

Thanks,
Jason

snips/NOCOL or NetSaint. With snips (NOCOL back when I used it) I had it running with qpage and a separate analog line so that it would dialup my paging provider and page me if a server or internet connectivity went down. That is the only way to do true, reliable outage notification.

snort + demarc looks cool though, I'm going to check that out myself.

Another vote for Demarc here. A bit of install work, but well worth it.

Their terms for free use are very fair and make it incredibly attainable by smaller hosts.