What are people using in their labs to monitor and manage servers? Anyone using Spiceworks or a similar package?
Just as a FYI - I have NR running on the main site. (Forums are having a networking challenge ATM) - My summary:My focus is on application monitoring, which is a bit deeper than server/network monitoring.
For application monitoring, I'm a big fan of New Relic, although the Pro pricing is far too high for home use (and probably too high for any cloud-like architecture), the lite version is merely OK, and the free version is close to useless since they trimmed off the drill-down features and keep only 30 minutes of data.
I completely agree: They need a new pricing model that fits the new "lots of fairly small and inexpensive servers each of which isn't that important" architectures....
Here's the sad thing. If they had a $50/m plan that I could get pro monitoring for the entire 10U virtualized infrastructure I would generate $600 this year for the company.
Did you post that setup? would like to see as I too would be a new relic pro customer at $5-10/mo but they price 10x higher.I'm using cacti to monitor the normal stuff exposed via SNMP and added someones IPMI script to keep an eye on the C6100 node stuff.
Don't have anything for management, only thing I've quasi stream lined is bash scripts on a Linux VM for common IPMI functions so I don't need to login to the stupid C6100 web interfaces.
I haven't posted any screenshots of it. I accidentally nuked my cacti VM (was tired and deleted vhd instead of detaching it). In the process of setting it back upDid you post that setup? would like to see as I too would be a new relic pro customer at $5-10/mo but they price 10x higher.
#!/bin/sh
echo -n "c6100node: "; ipmitool -I lan -U root -P root -H nodeIP chassis status | grep "System Power" |cut -f2 -d ":"
echo -n "x9-scm-f: "; ipmitool -I lan -U ADMIN -P ADMIN -H 192.168.0.81 chassis status | grep "System Power" |cut -f2 -d ":"
alias xen='ipmitool -I lan -U root -P root -H xenserver'
Did some research:
Graphdat looks like a cool option. I can't find pricing but it says free? https://dashboard.graphdat.com/landing
Datadog has a pricing structure more what we would want to see: Datadog - Pricing -- paid version is $15/host/mo
Also New Relic Lite has a REST API: https://newrelic.com/docs/instrumentation/getting-started-with-the-new-relic-rest-api
Might want to also check out GroundWork. They integrate Nagios and Cacti and a number of other open source projects. Their Core product (community edition) is free for up to 50 devices.
GroundWork - The Open Platform for IT Monitoring
Overview - GroundWork
+1 - If you have the time to setup Zabbix it can made a very power full monitoring tool! It has support for many enterprise features like cluster monitoring and as Swdlmarco says the community is very active.I use Zabbix pretty heavily across our infrastructure; at one point 4 sites, nearly 500 "hosts" and 1000's of items. It's open source, and they do offer commercial support and training. Active community for help, forum and IRC channel.
Homepage of Zabbix :: An Enterprise-Class Open Source Distributed Monitoring Solution
We recently started using CopperEgg for some things, it's $$ though. Interface is buggy though.