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Re: OS, Hardware, Network - Logging, Monitoring, and Alerting

  • From: Laurence F. Sheldon, Jr.
  • Date: Thu Jun 26 09:59:11 2008
Rev. Jeffrey Paul wrote: 
Hi.  I've a (theoretically) simple problem and I'm wondering how others
solve it.

Taken one at a time, mos of them are simple. Most of life is like that.


1) Is SNMP the best way to do this?  Obviously some of the data (service
checks) will need to be collected other ways.

I've actually been out of the admin biz for some time but back in the day I was very found of SNMP tools for all sorts of reporting.

For output I liked MRTG for most things, WhatsUpGold had some nice features if you would rather pay money.

For alarms, I used some unix hack or another (home-made).

I also used home-made hacks to gather data about things that did not have a suitable SNMP interface.

2) Is there any good solution that does both logging/trending of this
data and also notification/monitoring/alerting?  I've used both Nagios
and Cacti in the past, and, due to the number of individual things being
monitored (3-5 items per OS instance, 5-10 items per physical server,
10-50 things per network device), setting them both up independently
seems like a huge pain.  Also, I've never really liked Nagios that much.

See MRTG, RRD, et al.

I recently entertained the idea of writing a CGI that output all of this
information in a standard format (csv?), distributing and installing it, then
collecting it periodically at a central location and doing all the
rrd/notification myself, but then realized that this problem must've
been solved a million times already.

There's got to be a better way. What do you guys use?

I had the luxury of management that thought managing was a good idea, so I had a machine pretty much dedicated to systems management and all the machines (including routers, bridges, hubs, and such) reported to it. We had a web interface to the MRTG and MRTG-like presentations.

(I'm not opposed to non-free solutions, provided they work better.)

Just before the fired me for being too old, they bought all the HP and cisco stuff in the world. I do not recommend any of it.
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