[Sderby] Server monitoring

[Jak]

Mike Hemstock wrote:
> Can anyone recommend any good server monitoring tools.  Preferably to monitor 
> both the server as a whole and the individualdaemons.  I'd also like some 
> kind of response to.  Eg server dies someone gets a text, daemon dies, it 
> gets logged and restarted.
> 
> Mike.
> 

Hi Mike/All

Quick comment from the absentee lurker:

At the ISP, we use Nagios (was NetSaint) and Whatsup gold. The network 
ops guy is not particularly penguin oriented, so tends to prefer 
WhatsUp... You can guess my preference. Whatsup is very good at 
discovering services/daemons etc, but I prefer Nagios for sheer control.

Nagios is very nice insofar as you can get it to carry out just about 
any action you like - we've got pager and a nokia rigged up for sms, and 
the list of plugins is getting pretty impressive - to carry out actions 
on the server/box in question.

As always with a *nix app, you can pipe to any other app you care to 
mention for anything else.

Nagios has been very reliable, but can be a bit of a swine to get the 
dependancies sorted on a large-ish setup - ie you don't want an alert 
for every device behind a router!

The monioring summary is clear and informative, and is web based - not 
yet found a browser it doesn't like, which is a big bonus over some of 
the activex nastiness I've seen.

Cheers all, hope this helps.

Jak