recommendations for external montioring services?

Jim Richardson weaselkeeper at gmail.com
Mon Dec 12 20:37:39 UTC 2011


On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 11:18 AM, Edward Dore
<edward.dore at freethought-internet.co.uk> wrote:
> Take a look at Panopta - we use it to compliment our internal monitoring and find it great compared to some of the systems we've used in the past (Pingdom, Binary Canary).
>
> The interface is easy to use and responsive, we don't get false positives and there are a good range of checks. There's an API as well if you want to integrate it.
>
> I'd stay clear of the software agent though, we've had a few issues with that. For remote service checks we love it.
>
> Edward Dore
> Freethought Internet
>
> On 12 Dec 2011, at 19:10, Eric J Esslinger wrote:
>
>> I'm not looking to monitor a massive infrastructure: 3 web sites, 2 mail servers (pop,imap,submission port, https webmail), 4 dns servers (including lookups to ensure they're not listening but not talking), and one inbound mx. A few network points to ping to ensure connectivity throughout my system. Scheduled notification windows (for example, during work hours I don't want my phone pinged unless it's everything going offline. Off hours I do. Secondary notifications if problem persists to other users, or in the event of many triggers. That sort of thing). Sensitivity settings (If web server 1 shows down for 5 min, that's not a big deal. Another one if it doesn't respond to repeated queries within 1 minute is a big deal) A Weekly summary of issues would be nice. (especially the 'well it was down for a short bit but we didn't notify as per settings')
>> I don't have a lot of money to throw at this. I DO have detailed internal monitoring of our systems  but sometimes that is not entirely useful, due to the fact that there are a few 'single points of failure' within our network/notification system, not to mention if the monitor itself goes offline it's not exactly going to be able to tell me about it. (and that happened once, right before the mail server decided to stop receiving mail).
>>
>> _____


Nagios, or Zabbix are the ones I am most familiar with.  Zabbix is a
bit involved to set up, and may not be what you need in the scale of
things.  Nagios is a bit cumbersome to keep up with rapidly changing
systems of any size, but is good for small (and large) setups that are
more static.  Not without it's quirks mind, and takes a bit of work to
set up if you've never done it before.  But doesn't require a DB
backend, or any other stuff, just a server to put it on.  No agent
needed, as long as everything you want to check is "gettable" from the
server, like checking that a mail server is available for connections,
etc.  But can use agent checks, or pretty much any other checks.

-- 
http://neon-buddha.net




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