We've looked at many server monitoring sites such as QWKmon.com, internetseer.com etc. but they are all lacking many of the features we're loking for. If you have 10 or 15 servers you can easily pay $500+ per month for monitoring. How interested would all of you be if I were to develop a new service with more features for less $ ?

Any suggestions you may have would really help me out....

Howdy,

You might want to check out www.nagios.org. You can monitor your own servers then.

You'll still prob. want some outside monitoring, but Nagios is a good start.

Frank

Nagios ??

hmm..That looks like a netsaint replica .. hehehe.. even the GUI looks the same ..except for different logo.

Checkout
http://www.netsaint.org

ServersAlive has a free version.

Think he's asking suggestions for making is own one :).

How bout having the results being able to be incorporated onto the hosting companies own webpage?

D'oh. That's what I get for looking at everybody else's post and skimming over the initial post.

Originally posted by drhonk
Nagios ??

hmm..That looks like a netsaint replica .. hehehe.. even the GUI looks the same ..except for different logo.

Checkout
http://www.netsaint.org

Nagios, is the latest version of netsaint. Netsaint is no longer called netsaint, but Nagios. Its not a rip.

For those of you who want to have a custom server uptime page in real time check out this great script I found at http://www.ccts-ent.com/ism/ .

I'll second ServersAlive (http://www.woodstone.nu/salive/)... great program!

The free version limits the number of domains/sites but the paid version is very reasonable and has unlimited sites... with email/pager notification etc.

Full version is only $90 and supports unlimited domains

I've had it running on an NT4 server for about 3 months without a glitch... it's checking every 60 seconds (about 25 sites)

Have a look at IPMonitor if you are not publishing the data on your own website. It''s priced at approx. $695,- see http://www.deepmetrix.com . It supports snmp monitoring as well as transaction based monitoring (ASP) and has been recognised as industry leader multiple times. Personally I found this to be the best alternative also with my wallet in mind. Feature wise the best one I came across was OneSight linked with Farsight untill I started enquiring about the pricing you can find them at http://www.gomeznetworks.com .

Hpoe you find this usefull.

Doc
BTW netsaint looks pretty nifty too (keeping in mind that it's free)

This is what I just got from IPMonitor:

"Thank you for your inquiry. Using ipMonitor to monitor devices outside you LAN is not recommended due to the nature of accessing across the internet. The potential for time lag, data loss, alerts not arriving, are all things to be aware of.

You would be better to install ipMonitor where these servers are located and access the ipMonitor installation remotely, as it is browser based.

With regards to monitoring Linux servers, please see the following:

http://www.deepmetrix.com/ipmonitor/service/faqs/config1.asp

Note that ipMonitor must install on a Windows machine; as it runs as a service in Windows NT, 2000, or XP."

This is not good for most of us running Linux servers out of NOCs ;-) .

Another product worth mentioning (if you are using Windows) is Opalis robot http://www.opalis.com an visual (object based) scripting tool which has objects (inluding http) which would even allow you to setup transaction based monitoring... Oh well... just to be complete...

Cheers,
DrAtomic

Originally posted by successful
This is not good for most of us running Linux servers out of NOCs ;-) .

True... but definitely worth checking out if you have a mixed environment running in a DC...
[rant on]Personally I am more tempted to use a commercial product since it's support is usally (not always) much better and you are not making your business dependent on an alcoholic drugs abusing student with a like for cobalt :D From this perspective I'm trying to get everyone out here not to forget that there is an alternative for freeware/opensource software... [rant off]

DrAtomic

Originally posted by successful
How interested would all of you be if I were to develop a new service with more features for less $ ?


Sorry I missed that bit, I would definatly be interested in some sort of mix between OneSight and NetSaint targeted for webhosting (with each client being able to monitor his/her website and even further down to support dedicated servers) at a cost of max. $5000,- per monitoring server (capable of monitoring about 30-40 servers and some 10000 domains).

BTW What all of them lack is a maintance mode where you can place a server into scheduled maintenance (thus not effecting the SLA). Also a suspend would be nice so that if a dedicated customer decides to take his server down for a couple of days that it doesn't get stuck up in my main monitoring screen generating alerts and page me out of my bed about 12 times a night...

Our business is from shared to full-application-managed (to give some background info), thát's why I want them to go further then just a plain http and/or ping check (which is sooooooooo easy but also sooooooooooooooo insufficient). They do exist but it's simply not commercially justify-able (making up english as I go :D) since their pricing is completly ridiculous. Even parties like PSINet simply use freeware/opensource solutions (MRTG/NetCool) that they modified, Exodus on the other hand uses (or is that used :D) Tivoli, which I despice since it's requires a comlete development team to reprogram (tune) it according to your business model. As far as I know of there is no really good one in all solution for the hosting industry (matching my standards and wishes), so yes if you can make something that is closer to what I want and still affordable I would defintly buy it.

Cheers,
DrAtomic

Originally posted by DrAtomic

BTW What all of them lack is a maintance mode where you can place a server into scheduled maintenance (thus not effecting the SLA). Also a suspend would be nice so that if a dedicated customer decides to take his server down for a couple of days that it doesn't get stuck up in my main monitoring screen generating alerts and page me out of my bed about 12 times a night...


umm, ... I have not tested it yet, but Nagios has scheduled outages. What you describe is exactly what it's for.

Frank

Thanx Frank, I must admit that I only looked at netsaint before the latest release... I will look at it again... Thanx again for correcting me!

Cheers,
DrAtomic