how to find out one of the servers is down

[Vale]

Chris St. Pierre wrote:

>There are lots of service monitoring tools out there (probably the
>best known are Big Brother (http://www.bb4.com) and Nagios
>(http://www.nagios.org).  I personally use Nagios, which can be
>configured to notify you via email, pager, or probably even carrier
>pigeon.  It can be set up to monitor individual services, too, which a
>simple ping solution won't do; I find that it's far more common that,
>e.g., the samba *process* crashes rather than the samba *box*, and
>Nagios can tell me that.  It can be a little bit of a bear to set up,
>but absolutely worth it, IMHO.
>
>Chris St. Pierre
>Unix Systems Administrator
>Nebraska Wesleyan University
>
>On Thu, 14 Jul 2005, Venkat Reddy Valluri wrote:
>
>  
>
>>Hi
>>   How to find out one of linux servers is down adn is there any way for it to be informed thru email notification
>>
>>Thks&Rgds
>>--Venkat
>>
>>-- 
>>redhat-list mailing list
>>unsubscribe mailto:redhat-list-request at redhat.com?subject=unsubscribe
>>https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
>>
>>    
>>
>
>  
>
These are great options, but both assume you have another box and 
network to run them on (no sense in a box monitoring itself.. you have a 
glaring single port of failure).  If you're serious about monitoring 
your server(s), your best bet is a monitoring service like those 
provided by:
Keynote Red Alert -- www.redalert.com (about the best there is, but you 
pay for it)
Alertra -- www.alertra.com (popular, never used them though)
SiteUptime -- www.siteuptime.com
WebsitePulse -- www.websitepulse.com
etc, etc...  plenty out there just use trusty Google al la "web site 
monitoring".
You wont have all of the flexibility of using your own software to 
monitor, but you will have a much more effective monitoring solution 
this way.  It is prohibitively expensive to implement a monitoring 
solution that will provide you the same level of reliability as one of 
these service providers.  Most if not all of the service providers 
listed above provide free trials to demo their service.

Valentino D'Ostilio
GDI Professional Services
www.gdi-tech.com