Howdy Techies!

Im currently in search of a network monitoring suite/program to do a few basic things from my small (>100 network resources) company. Ideally this network monitor would include:

- Email Alerts when a service is down
- Logs of alerts, activity
- Uptime details (SLA) for services
- Ability to monitor router/bandwidth information
- Ability to check both linux and windows

I have been thinking about ipMonitor (ipmonitor.com) but it seems a little too beefy for what im looking for.

What do people prefer?

Anyone have any horror stories?

Advice for a new Admin IT?

Any intelligent discussion is greatly appreciated, have a great day!

Are you looking for a 3rd party to monitor your servers/sevices or an in-house system?

If you don't mind doing all the config, Nagios is extremely flexible/expandable but I'm not 100% sure about bandwidth info... I've always used MRTG for that sort of thing.

I run my own monitoring scripts to just check service availability, etc. that emails/pages on failure and restore. I have been looking into a 3rd party such as Hyperspin for SLA details but haven't spent much time researching it yet.

I was thinking third party, but only because that seems like a faster route to a monitoring solution. I have seen nagios, but have not dealt with the set up / install myself

/bumpitybump

Hello,

We use internetseer.com to monitor our servers, and are happy with their service.

You said you've seen Nagios but haven't set it up. There's a great tutorial on this here (http://www.linuxtoday.com/news/2006022301126OSHLSW). I personally was a little overwhelmed by the installation provided by their user guide but the aforementioned link was much more helpful.

It can do a bit of the other things but it depends on how you tweak it. I also use HostTracker.com to monitor downtime of my websites. Best thing is that it's free.

Here's another vote for HostTracker. They are a great, free solution and have never let me down.

Yeah HostTracker are very good.

We use several monitoring companies such as Hyperspin, HostTracker, SiteUptime, ServiceUptime but we do have SMS notifications, as well as obviously email alerts, with HostTracker and it seems very reliable :)

Looks like Host-Tracker is down?

It most certainly does. Maybe they need to have someone monitor their service :eek:

I was trying HostTracker.com and getting a spam page :)

so, yeah... http://host-tracker.com/ is returning an internal error - so technically it's not down as it's responding, LOL

I use a semi-in-house system built upon a perl script and wget to verify responses and report failures (i.e. port 80 responds with "200 OK" then host is up, if it responds with anything else, trigger an alert with the details - if no response, trigger an alert with "no response" as reason)

thanks for all your helpful feedback, ill let everyone know what happens ;)