Server Monitoring

[paulkoan]

Hello,

With more servers coming online, we are looking for better ways to monitor and alert on situations that arise. Dedicateds have out of band monitoring of course, but it would be good to get a little more cohesive. Something that can give a snapshot of the current status of all the servers and can notify via email, sms etc.

SNMPv3 perhaps? Though it would need to be robust enough to survive a cPanel upgrade, and also work across different platforms. Something "inband" from multiple sources would be good. Like a soap call to port 80 that returns a current status - preferably obtained from multiple sources so that a local network outage didn't cause a server outage indication.

What are people here using?

 

[.amaZe]

I have a managed server, but I have heard good things about platniumservermanagement.com.

 

[Artashes]

paulkoan, while your request is a little more technical for me to fully understand, you never know if you find the following helpful.

I don't have extensive experience with monitoring services. I have used a couple of old-timer free services before, at one point I used Alertra. As of recent couple of weeks I have been using desktop application "Servera Suite" server monitoring from avidinteractive.com. It allows you to monitor many servers at the same time and have notification abilities as well. Very easy to use and it does a good job. Worth checking into.

Best,

 

[KiranHost]

Take a look at host-tracker.com. Best of all, it's free!

 

[SagoRyan]

Where I work, we've started using Ubersmith, plus we still use ipswitch's WhatsUp Gold. I know with Ubermith you can setup monitors on just about anything (ICMP, TCP, DNS, SSL, etc.) and it's customizable. Not sure as to how much Ubersmith runs cost-wise, but it's a great tool.

 

[ashley5]

Try OPMANAGER it's a good one. Its expensive though, but worth giving a try.

 

[URLhost]

definitely give PSM a try, we are working towards a year of using their service and its the best $30 ever spend for admin works

:thumbsup:

 

[DonHouston]

That aint no joke. PSM is a very good company. I also would recomend them to anyone.....

 

[proweb2006]

DNS monitoring

If you want to monitor sites, DNS fo rmultiple sites and even set up failover so never down again get DNSMAdeEasy and run it on a home computer to monitor all your sites. Youll need a server or more somewhere else than the servers you are monitoring and a machine to run the monitor on but worth it.
If ip goes down, check however many minutes you set, it will dynamically switch DNS to elsewhere where you have a backup or even just a splash page set up explaining the problem

For $89 per license is worth ever penny, Im in process of setting up the secondary reuirements now, like the server elsewhere form my datacenter

 

[yphost.com]

Platinumservermanagement.com just charges $9.95/month for server monitoring and $19.95 for monitoring + management
GO FOR THEM!!!

 

[alemcherry]

Monitoring alone? checkout this!
http://audited.netcraft.com/dsm

 

[sparkstation]

WhatsUpGold is good but exp.

 

[Rob]

Why not try status2k - install it at a remote location so you are then able to monitor the status of all your servers and identify and potential problems.

You could also try Servera Suite which looks quite good - we were thinking of giving it a try at some point.

 

[Waveweb]

one of the best one is Nagios http://www.nagios.org/ take a look

whatsup is very good but it does require some time to setup.

 

[TotallyHost]

one of the best one is Nagios http://www.nagios.org/ take a look

whatsup is very good but it does require some time to setup.

This is what we use and it's worked perfectly for us on all of our servers. It takes a few moments to get it setup and working, but once you do it won't ever let you down.

 

[pageBuzz]

server monitoring

Personally I write all my own programs to take care of that. The process is almost too simple to be using outside software.

Create a basic script on the server to print STOUT to a text file that is accessed by a remote server and databased or e-mailed to you. That way you have complete control of what the data wil be and how often you you want reports.

I posted a simple website/server monitor script on my free perl scripts website http://bumblebeeware.com/monitor/

Of course you can expand that to feed you any of the server details that concern you. Its a nice free script for those of you that don't need to know any more than if the server is up and accessible.

I run my own programs that monitor my servers and call my cell with an audio message when a server is unreachable. I like having a hard phone line as a backup to e-mail. That is also a pretty basic hack for the script I posted above. I would be happy to share that mod with anyone interested.