Monitoring?

Notice: Page may contain affiliate links for which we may earn a small commission through services like Amazon Affiliates or Skimlinks.
TeeJayHoward

TeeJayHoward

Active Member
Feb 12, 2013
376
112
43
What I'm looking for:
CPU utilization
CPU temperature
Disk utilization (MB/s, IOPS, capacity)
Disk temperature
Power utilization
RAM utilization
Service crashed/offline
VM crashed/offline
Host crashed/offline

I'd like all of this to be available in graphical format, with adjustable time increments. And I'd prefer free software which works with a few dozen VMs/hosts/etc. I don't want to install a client on each VM - I'd rather just configure existing snmp traps or something similar. If the software can email me instead of relying on me looking at a web page, all the better. But really, I just want to know...

What monitoring software do you guys use, and would you recommend it?
 
markarr

markarr

Active Member
Oct 31, 2013
421
122
43
For free I use observium (free doesn't do alerts but the yearly subscription does) It does snmp 1, 2, 3 has a bunch of mib's for major network vendors. It runs on ubuntu or debian best but can work on CentOS. Gives you great graphs, on network devices you can even do "realtime" statistics on the interfaces. But whatever the device will push over snmp it should read.

For in-depth disk statistics I think you need more than snmp to get those.
 
  • Like
Reactions: OBasel
TuxDude

TuxDude

Well-Known Member
Sep 17, 2011
616
338
63
I've been a fan of Cacti for monitoring stuff for quite a few years now. It won't do most of your requirements without a little work, but if you get on the forums there are templates you can download/import that should get you quite a few of them. It takes in SNMP data really easily, but can also run scripts which opens it up to pretty much everything - I usually say that Cacti will take in anything thats a number and make pretty graphs of it for any time-span you like (and the web UI is quite good for selecting what time-span you want, zooming in for more detail of a specific time, etc.)

While it was originally written on/for linux (it's written in PHP, runs on a standard LAMP stack), it can also be run from a windows server. Usually I avoid running PHP/MySQL on windows but in the case of Cacti it opens up a new possibility - it can now run PowerShell scripts, which can really easily use WMI to gather a ton of info from an AD domain full of systems.
 
wildchild

wildchild

Active Member
Feb 4, 2014
389
57
28
zabbix is my choice, free , easy, templating, snmp , pre fab windows agents , vmware and pretty big templating community
 
TeeJayHoward

TeeJayHoward

Active Member
Feb 12, 2013
376
112
43
I looked into Zabbix since there were two recommendations for it. You need a zabbix user and a zabbix agent on each system? Ick! No thank you. 'Course, it could be the same with all the monitoring solutions for all I know.

Is there a downside to just installing a dozen different monitoring solutions and choosing the one I like best? They're not going to interfere with each other, right?
 
D

dba

Moderator
Feb 20, 2012
1,477
184
63
San Francisco Bay Area, California, USA
TeeJayHoward said:
What I'm looking for:
CPU utilization
CPU temperature
Disk utilization (MB/s, IOPS, capacity)
Disk temperature
Power utilization
RAM utilization
Service crashed/offline
VM crashed/offline
Host crashed/offline

I'd like all of this to be available in graphical format, with adjustable time increments. And I'd prefer free software which works with a few dozen VMs/hosts/etc. I don't want to install a client on each VM - I'd rather just configure existing snmp traps or something similar. If the software can email me instead of relying on me looking at a web page, all the better. But really, I just want to know...

What monitoring software do you guys use, and would you recommend it?
Click to expand...
Application monitoring: New Relic is brilliant
System/App
TeeJayHoward said:
I looked into Zabbix since there were two recommendations for it. You need a zabbix user and a zabbix agent on each system? Ick! No thank you. 'Course, it could be the same with all the monitoring solutions for all I know.

Is there a downside to just installing a dozen different monitoring solutions and choosing the one I like best? They're not going to interfere with each other, right?
Click to expand...
In my experience, good monitoring is going to require some sort of agent.
 
T_Minus

T_Minus

Build. Break. Fix. Repeat
Feb 15, 2015
7,641
2,058
113
App - New Relic
System - Agent from one of various companies... or what about open source IPMI ?
 
wildchild

wildchild

Active Member
Feb 4, 2014
389
57
28
TeeJayHoward said:
I looked into Zabbix since there were two recommendations for it. You need a zabbix user and a zabbix agent on each system? Ick! No thank you. 'Course, it could be the same with all the monitoring solutions for all I know.

Is there a downside to just installing a dozen different monitoring solutions and choosing the one I like best? They're not going to interfere with each other, right?
Click to expand...
no you dont..

you can perfectly monitor using snmp ( i know i am)
windows, network, vmware and my omnios box

most devices now have snmp either build in or as a feature.
zabbix includes a snmp walker to easily develop ones own templates
 
TeeJayHoward

TeeJayHoward

Active Member
Feb 12, 2013
376
112
43
Started playing with Zabbix. Installation and configuration isn't exactly as easy as I'd hoped it would be on CentOS7. Maybe this'll help some poor web crawler one day:

Code: 
    systemctl disable firewalld;systemctl stop firewalld
    vi /etc/sysconfig/selinux (SET SELINUX TO DISABLED AND REBOOT)
    yum install epel-release yum-utils wget
    yum-config-manager --add-repo http://repo.zabbix.com/zabbix/2.4/rhel/7/x86_64
    yum install --nogpgcheck zabbix-server-mysql zabbix-web-mysql
    wget http://dev.mysql.com/get/mysql-community-release-el7-5.noarch.rpm
    rpm -ivh mysql-community-release-el7-5.noarch.rpm
    rm mysql-community-release-el7-5.noarch.rpm
    yum install mysql-community-server
    cd /usr/share/doc/zabbix-server-mysql-2.4.4/create
   service mysql start
   mysql -uroot  
   create database zabbix character set utf8 collate utf8_bin;quit
   mysql -uroot zabbix < schema.sql ;mysql -uroot zabbix < images.sql ;mysql -uroot zabbix < data.sql
   echo "DBHost=localhost" >> /etc/zabbix/zabbix_server.conf ; echo "DBName=zabbix" >> /etc/zabbix/zabbix_server.conf ; echo "DBUser=root" >> /etc/zabbix/zabbix_server.conf ; echo "DBPassword=" >> /etc/zabbix/zabbix_server.conf
   systemctl enable zabbix-server
   systemctl enable httpd
   vi /etc/zabbix/zabbix_server.conf
   systemctl start zabbix-server
   systemctl start httpd
At this point, there's a (very unsecure - root for database access and SELinux disabled!) version of zabbix running on http://<server hostname>/zabbix. Log in with Admin/zabbix.
 
wildchild

wildchild

Active Member
Feb 4, 2014
389
57
28
Or you could simply download the pre-made vm already for playing

after you have desided on what and if you like it, setup your own, using a secured setup
 
T_Minus

T_Minus

Build. Break. Fix. Repeat
Feb 15, 2015
7,641
2,058
113
All SaaS is over priced until you get to higher levels and negotiate much steeper discounts. It's amazing what the startup world can fuel.

(Silently working on multiple SaaS products... LOL)
 
D

dba

Moderator
Feb 20, 2012
1,477
184
63
San Francisco Bay Area, California, USA
MiniKnight said:
NewRelic is also really pricey if you aren't doing application monitoring or if you're running smaller applications.
Click to expand...
True. Their $150/server/month is out of reach for home monitoring, but they do have a free stripped-down plan that is quite good. And, by the way, they can be more like $50/server/month negotiated if you have more than a handful of servers.
 
  • Like
Reactions: T_Minus
MiniKnight

MiniKnight

Well-Known Member
Mar 30, 2012
3,073
974
113
NYC
dba said:
True. Their $150/server/month is out of reach for home monitoring, but they do have a free stripped-down plan that is quite good. And, by the way, they can be more like $50/server/month negotiated if you have more than a handful of servers.
Click to expand...
Oh yea, even with a test set of 5 servers just wait for end of quarter and hammer the rep. Still, we have a $5000-10000 monthly bill at work and it isn't running on that many servers. Compared to salesforce I still think it's expensive.
 
TechIsCool

TechIsCool

Active Member
Feb 8, 2012
263
117
43
Clinton, WA
techiscool.com
I have not seen it mentioned yet but I use Icinga 2 for all my monitoring and love working with it. the configurations make sense, the flow makes sense, and you can monitor only with snmp for a clientless management standpoint or you can run checks via a client on each machine giving you full access to scripting on the local machine. Let me know if you have questions about it.
 
M

moto211

Member
Aug 20, 2014
53
6
8
39
PRTG free is now 100 sensors. You can custom write sensors to monitor everything on a system with 1 sensor.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom