What do use for monitoring loads?? Are there services much like server monitoring that can SMS or notify you of high loads. We could build this ourselves, but just want to see what's already in the market place first etc..

Thanks folks. :)

Nagios (www.nagios.org) (formerly Net Saint). There is a module to monitor loads. You can be notified at a warning and critical level, based on the 1,5 and 15 minute load average.

Frank

We use a combination of Nagios and a custom written script to notify us. Works pretty well.

We have a python based daemon (dont quote me on this in a life or death situation I didnt write it myself) running on every server that reports the uptime of all services we wish, as well as partition monitoring, load monitoring etc. Those daemons are queried by a auto refreshing php script that you can load from anywhere which will play an audible alert for whatever admin has the window open, and let them know what the problem is on what server. It could pretty easily be modified to send an email or page someone instead of make the audible alert (or both?) however we have not done so because there are generally people working all the time now. Back before we had that setup we used IPSentry (ipsentry.com) to query the servers every minute to check for the same types on things, and that has modules that will email/page/call etc. based on a set of alerts, and its fairly customizable.

For the cost of a few months of paying for one of those monitoring services you can have someon whos good at PHP take the hour or two and write you your own custom solution to your specs exactly, and definatly save money in the long run, especially if you are monitoring several servers.

-Brendan

Thanks. :) I'll get my programmer to whip something up.