Network and Server monitoring

[Les Mikesell]

On Sat, 2005-09-10 at 10:50, Scot L. Harris wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-09-10 at 11:03, Jonathan Carpenter wrote:
> > I am looking for a way to monitor my servers status. I am also wanting
> > to monitoring specific process or daemons as well and alert me when
> > there is an issue either by email or pager. I would also like to have
> > some sort of IDS or log checking that will alert me when there is a
> > lot of activity in my secure log or messages log out of the ordinary.
> > My network is blocking icmp packets so I cannot ping each server at
> > the current time. Can anyone recommend anything for me? Any help would
> > be greatly appreciated.

> You probably want to take a look at something like Big Brother or
> Hobbit.  OpenNMS and Nagios are other options you can use.  They require
> a little more effort to setup than Big Brother.  Any of these can be
> used to monitor systems and services on your network.  

I've used spong from http://spong.sourceforge.net/ for ages,
simply because it was around before Nagios, had a way to
throttle the notification messages  and you could add
snippets of perl for custom tests.  It hasn't been
maintained for a while but it still works.  It does
normally do a ping before other network service tests but
that is configurable.  I'd probably look at Nagios first
if I were starting over, but spong as done a good
job of providing a simple web status display and
email notifications.

I also use cacti http://www.cacti.net/ to graph network
traffic and cpu and memory use via snmp because it is
so easy to set up.  However, it does not provide any
way to do notifications when a host is down or values
cross some threshold.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com