Hi

I am looking for a monitor like qwkmon to monitor my site & services has anybody got any suggestions. it must be remotely hosted

Sean

Search or browse the forum. I remember a thread like that a few days ago.

PEter

I use the InternetSeer.com free service. It works OK, although sometimes it isn't consistent as to testing intervals. Also, if you use the free service you get a bunch of spam from them. I guess that's only fair, but you should be aware of it.

check out some freewares/commercial softs that may help you

www.netsaint.org
www.bb4.com

and long list from
http://dir.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Business_to_Business/Communications_and_Networking/Internet_and_World_Wide_Web/Network_Management/

and www.monitorhost.com

I've personally used Netsaint - it's great. I highly recommend it.

This is the best i have found for the price http://websitepulse.com/ .. I saved about $40 bucks when i moved from Qwkmon.. :)

I've been using Aletra.com. They've been excellent!

The pricing is very good, http://www.alertra.com/pricing

Netsaint has been renamed/replaced by Nagios (www.nagios.org).

Frank

Check out this thread:
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?threadid=51104

We use WebSitePulse.com (http://www.websitepulse.com/) here too, for about 1-2 months and it's been working great. Their support is very impressive and they're always adding new features. For example, they added a new SMS service, where you can get direct SMS text messages to your mobile phone where ever you are in the world, informing you of any downtimes and also you'll get a message when the server/port is working again. They've also added a few more locations that they monitor from, currently 3 locations in the USA, one in the UK and another one being setup in Germany. For the price that they charge, it's probably one of the best server monitor services online.

They've also got a 15 day free trial, even if you're prepared to pay from day 1, they still give you 15 days free :).

I've not used other server monitor services, so I can't comment on other companies, but that's probably because all the others cost too much when you want to monitor a lot of servers.

Alan

NetSaint (www.netsaint.org) is the best tool I found though it is tricky to setup, especially if you want to use advanced features like redundant monitoring. It was renamed by the author to Nagios (www.nagios.org) as correctly mentioned above, but we still use NetSaint 0.0.7 and don't see the reason to migrate to Nagios. It takes approx. 5 days for experienced Linux admin who never dealt with NetSaint before to read the docs and to setup it fully, but some fine-tuning will take weeks and weeks. You just don't realise how powerful this tool is until you get into it.

If you have less then 5 servers, my advice is to go with 3rd party monitoring company and save your time. You can expect to spend approx. $10-$25/mo. per server for monitoring service.

If however, you grow to 10, 25 or, like us, 79 servers, it does pay back to setup your own monitoring service. Going with 3rd party company is just too expensive in this case. Install NetSaint on minimum two servers and make them check each other as well.

Few words on performance.

We currently check our 79 servers for 119 services (in most cases it is just a ping, but in some severe cases we also monitor HTTP, SSL, DNS, POP, number of running processes, number of logged users and disk space available).

In our case with 30.3% of tests completed within 1 minute, 85.7% within 5 minutes and 100% within 15 minutes average bandwidth usage is mere 10 Kbit/s (less than 3.5 GB a month) and typical load average is 0.05 for a 1 GHz/512 MB RAM server running RH Linux 7.1. My safe assumption is you should be able to monitor more than a 1,000 services with one similar server, but we did not grow to that level yet to check that ;-).

Anyway, I would be interested to hear from monitoring companies out there how many services they are able to monitor from one server.

Well one reason to upgrade to Nagios is that the config files are much, much easier to deal with.

5 days seems a bit long to get it working, but I'll take your word.

Frank

Dabystru, $10-25/month/server is very high, but WebSitePulse.com doesn't charge that much. I've just customized a plan at their website and it comes to $82.97/month for 50 servers when you want all their other features aswell (including checking all the standard ports, such as SSH, HTTP, DNS, POP, etc).

Alan

my first time setting up netsaint to monitor 3 servers took a few hours at most.. i don't see how it can take someoen 5 days unless they read and type REALLY slow :)

Originally posted by ho247
$10-25/month/server is very high, but WebSitePulse.com doesn't charge that much. I've just customized a plan at their website and it comes to $82.97/month for 50 servers when you want all their other features aswell (including checking all the standard ports, such as SSH, HTTP, DNS, POP, etc).Can you please provide a link? $82.97 for 50 servers is very attractive. Looking at http://www.websitepulse.com/options.php3 I see $57.77 for 5 servers, which comes down to $11.50 per server.

The good thing about WebSitePulse.com is that you can customize the plan to what you want, so you can remove things that you don't want like "URLs to verify" feature that check a url for a particular word to make sure you haven't been hacked and the hacker has changed the page, or to make sure that the site is actually working. But if you want to just ping ports to make sure all those standard ports are running correctly, then this service is very low cost.

To get that price, go to the customize page here (http://www.websitepulse.com/selectplan.php3?plan=2&go=Go) and then change the number of hosts to 50, the URLs to Verify to 0 and "URL Monitoring Interval" to 120... then just press calculate. I now get $81.97, lol, can't really complain if I quoted one dollar too much before :).

Alan

Originally posted by bacid
my first time setting up netsaint to monitor 3 servers took a few hours at most.. Did you read the docs (200 or something pages)? I remember printing it took quite a while, not alone reading it. You must read very fast! :)

You are right, setting Netsaint for 3 servers would not take more than few hours. Setting it properly with individual contacts for every of 79 servers, customized monitoring services depending on each users' requirements, with redundand monitoring (there is a whole section in the docs about that) takes actually more than 5 days. If you want to monitor things like number of processes running and memory usage on each machine, you need to establish trusted relationship with each server, generate ssh keys etc.

We are still tweaking some monitoring parameters, 2 months after NetSaint was setup initially.

Originally posted by ho247
go to the customize page here (http://www.websitepulse.com/selectplan.php3?plan=2&go=Go) and then change the number of hosts to 50, the URLs to Verify to 0 and "URL Monitoring Interval" to 120... 120 minutes seems to be quite long, but even setting it to 5 minutes for 50 servers and 50 URLs with all options checked brought the price to nice $150 a month, or $3 per server. Cool! Thanks for the link.

No problem dabystru, it's VERY cheap if you're buying it for 50 servers... not to say that it isn't still low cost if you're buying it for a few sites. You could always test it out for 15 days, it's going to be a long day adding all those 50 servers though, lol.

Alan

I just installed hotsanic on my server. Nice little tool for monitoring traffic and hardware (cpu load, used memory...) and best of all it's free :)

Dunno if this was also the sort of tool you were looking for, but server monitoring to me doesn't only mean uptime...

hotsanic is very nice. I've been running it for a few months. Nice to have a historical perspective.


dabystru,

There is a lot to setup in your config, but I'd still look at the templated config files of Nagios. That might save a bit of time.

Frank

We installed HotSaNIC on one of our servers a few weeks back and it was a really good program, showing the history the load averages. But when it was installed every 10-15 minutes, there would be a spike up to about 1.5, whereas the load average is usually less than 0.5. When we removed HotSaNIC, the load average was back to normal and always below the 0.5 mark. So we decided not to use it as it causes extra, unnecessary load for the server.

Alan

I've noticed a load spike every hour, but I can't say whether it's hotsanic causing it as I never really checked the load before.

The peak can only be found in the system load, not in memory or CPU usage.

Yeah, mine was just happening in the system load averages too. It was the only software I installed when I noticed the peaks, so I figured it was HotSaNIC. Does anyone know any other software that can do the load average graph plotter like HotSaNIC does, but not use as much server resource?

Alan

If you are seeing a spike every 15 minutes, that sounds a lot like when hotsanic is generating the graphics. I'm pretty sure you can modify the settings and have it generate the graphics less often.

Frank

I figured that out too... I think it was set to generate every 15 minutes. But the thing is that if I set this to update every one hour or something, then the graphs would show old info and I actually need up-to-date stats.

Alan

hmm,

I can't really tell about the load from generating the graphs. The server I have it installed on is quite busy and the load is normally in the 2 - 3 range most of the day. The graph generation just does not stick out.

Frank