Monitor resource usage on 5-10 servers

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[H]ard|Gawd
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Looking to mointor a few servers for a small client of mine. I have a little bit of experience with nagios it just seems a bit cumbersome for this application. looking to see if anyone has any other suggestions before i go down that path.
 
Nagios is great, I use it at work to monitor a few hundred services. Once you understand how the config files and the plugins work, its actually really simple to use/configure. I would suggest getting the latest version from the nagios web site, and not using the one that comes in packages with most linux OS's as the packages tend to be very old.

Are your servers windows? Linux/Unix? Mixture?

Do you have a dedicated server to run nagios on? Maybe a little VM?

What kind of alerting do you want to do? Just email? EMail-> Text so you can get text messages? (We use both of these at work)

What do you want to monitor?
 
I have a small dedicated dual core box with 2gb of ram that I was going to put nagios on.

I will probably do email alerting but the primary use is to log cpu/ram usage on windows servers. as far as i know all servers at this location are windows based.

Basically the client is constantly complaining of slow performance and I need to be monitoring the servers a bit to better understand what is slowing them down.
 
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It all depends what you're looking for, collectd + grafana might be an option.
//Danne
 
Nagios has the steepest learning curve.
Cacti can be a pain in the ass if you use non-standard templates.
PRTG is windows only so I haven't run it.
Observium is easy sauce to learn.
 
looks like for now observium it is

Theres also "LibreNMS" which is an open source fork of Observium that includes some of the "pro" features. Theres a VM image of LibreNMS, and you can set it to update automatically.

I switched to it when the Observium CEO started acting like a dick and made it clear he doesn't care about you unless you are a Fortune 100 company. I obviously have a bias against him, so keep that in mind.
 
+1 PRTG

Easy, Secure, Light weight, Offsite, Has mobile app, Will trigger scripts based on alerts, emails, plus a million other thigns. Easy to use great tool! Yeah, I love PRTG, so what!
 
Zabbix can be very good if you put the time into configuring all it's features, but it's definitely not as user friendly as Nagios and Observium.
 
it's definitely not as user friendly as Nagios

That doesn't seem physically possible. I mean, I like Nagios, but there are so many steps involved in adding a new device, I could never get anyone except myself to manage it.
 
I've discovered an open source tool called NetXMS which I find brilliant.

The reason I chose it was because the backend database can sit on SQL server (which means I can query it from other applications and included data from it in my SSRS reports, which are in turn used for the screen on my wall which lists things like open helpdesk tickets etc
 
Nagios has the simplest learning curve, hardly... it has the hardest if you know nothing about it

Fully Automated Nagios = fan better version as it includes graphs and such.

Cacti

PRTG is stupid easy to set up and configure but requires more beefy hardware.
 
Site24x7 has server monotrs as well as website monitors, and a bunch of other monitors for Exchange servers, VMWare, IIS, SQL etc.

The cost is pretty low per year. Just do not get sucked into using their sms packages. Use sms to email gateways and setup texting that way.

Their app also quickly shows what is up and down.
 
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