Server monitoring

[kabix]

I was wondering what software are you guys using to monitor servers. In particular, disk space. I was looking for command line util so i can set sechedule task and email info but wasnt able to find anything.

What are good solutions for this?

[CoffeeFiend]

There are COUNTLESS ways to monitor servers... It really depends on your needs and preferences:

-How many servers?

-Are all servers local or distant?

-Windows only?

-PCs only? Or managed switches/routers as well and such?)

-How to monitor? SNMP? WMI? something else?

...

And the main issue: WHAT to monitor in the first place?

-responds to ping?

-check to see if web server responsive using HTTP request?

-check to see if some database is running OK?

-check see if network links are still up?

-various server infos like cpu load/ram utilisation/hd space? (this one seems like a "yes")

...

There are tons of ways to do this, from simple performance monitors/counters (watched manually), to simple tools like mrtg like seen at snmpboy (I use a very similar "home made" setup, but using rrdtool too and a few extras), to a bunch of open source apps, to high-end, expensive corporate solutions to monitor tons of various hardware scattered across the globe for NOS'es managing mission-critical stuff...

One could list tons of app names (mrtg/rrd, munin, cacti, nagios, solarwinds, netcool, snmpc, whatsup pro, openview, zabbix, ...) but it wouldn't help too much not knowing your actual needs and preferences first.

If all you really want is email disk space warning or such, then just write a simple script that'll get free space, compare it with a threshold, and send email via SMTP if too low. Schedule that to run whenever you want. Personally, checking disk space alone is NOWHERE NEAR good enough. You may also want to look at MOM (MS Operations Manager) 2005, or maybe even try 2007 beta 2.

[kabix]

Only Windows Servers, distant, PC only. I have basic windows 2000/2003 server. The goal would be to monitor basic server functions. I am starting with servers, any info would be great. I assume the freeware would not give as much as like MS Operations Manager but thats too expensive. I would just like to know how others monitor their servers and what software do you use. Does that make any sence?

[CoffeeFiend]

Yes, it does make sense. I don't know how many replies you'll get on this here though... If you want something simple and cheap, you can peek at snmpboy like I've mentionned before, but it's pretty much a "roll your own" solution (you gotta write the code to get the data you want to monitor yourself, via SNMP or WMI, and it does the graphing for you - or use rrd if you prefer). I also use other apps every now and then (MOM, SolarWinds and WhatsUp), but this is my primary/everyday monitoring tool.

[kabix]

is it me or http://snmpboy.msft.net/ is down?

[fizban2]

page is down kabix, i'll let crahak know.

[kabix]

thanks

[CoffeeFiend]

That's odd, because it did work at the time of posting, and I just checked it again before writing this very post and it's still working (I've never seen it being down before).

[kabix]

i dont know but it doesnt open.

[CoffeeFiend]

Well, there's likely a problem on your end then...

http://snmpboy.msft.net/

GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: snmpboy.msft.net
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-US; rv:1.8.0.6) Gecko/20060728 Firefox/1.5.0.6
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive

HTTP/1.x 200 OK
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 02:57:32 GMT
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
X-AspNet-Version: 1.1.4322
Cache-Control: private
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 5645

All requests go thru just fine. And I did try 3 browsers, just in curiosity to see if they were doing something weird, but it loads perfectly fine in all 3... Perhaps you're running some kind of IP blocking app (maybe via a HOSTS file too) which blocks the page (it's an Microsoft address range), either that or spyware issues are the 2 most likely causes. Otherwise, try flushing your DNS, see if the IP resolves, try a debugging proxy (to see HTTP traffic), try hopping thru any proxy (like Tor), so many things to try... Or don't even bother and look at any old graph made with mrtg or rrd, and pretent it says "free HD space" instead or such

[kabix]

insteresting indeed... tried from 4 different ISPs and only two the page loaded. So i guess all the computers have the same spyware. Anyway thanks for info.