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Started: 24/06/2008 10:45

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shil1998

Server Monitoring

Hi, Over the last year or so we've increased our number of windows servers (real and virtual). We're now in a position where it's difficult to keep track of everything so we want to implement a monitoring system. We have various linux servers as well as w2k3 stuff, so would prefer one system that can monitor both platforms. Nagios has been suggested to us, but it looks like a steep learning curve to get it configured. Has anyone got recommendations for another product (Open Source or commercial), or guidelines for configuring Nagios to monitor Windows servers? I'm just interested in monitoring uptime and load for the moment - nothing too fancy! Thanks, Ian M

Posted: 24/06/2008 11:50

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Michael

I have spoken to are network guys about this and they have recommended a product called Groundworks. The GUI is easy to use and has features such as autodiscovery as well as easy administration of Nagios.

There is a VM to play with:

http://www.groundworkopensource.com/community/downloads/vmware-download.html

and a good guide:

http://voxel.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/gwmos/gwmcevm521-install-guide_final.pdf

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Posted: 24/06/2008 12:24

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Its a few years since I've used Nagios but I'd say it was alright. The learning curve wasn't too bad at all but you did have to put some time and effort into setting it up effectively.

There wasn't any autodiscovery and there didn't appear to be much utilisation of WMI. Mind you my experience of some autodiscovery with other software is that it has limited use.

All of the windows monitoring beyond ping was done through an on server agent. It worked reasonably well.

Configuration wasn't too bad but lengthy it was frustrating that all the relationships had to be hand plumbed and at the time there was no way of 'inheriting dependencies'. So if there wasn't a direct relationship detailed in nagios between 2 assets it wouldn't accurately report impact if 1 were affected. My understanding is that this has now all changed.

J

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Posted: 24/06/2008 12:48

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john

We have recently set up nagios manually and it was quite a long boring task. there is no auto discovery and the dependency checking is pretty limited. however groundwork is pretty awesome it adds the things which nagios needs. auto discovery and automatic dependency mapping. it also has a nice web interface for adding hosts and service checks. the need for external checks is no longer needed. nagios can make extensive use of snmp and you can right your own wmi checks as well. again groundwork has implmeted all of this. it is also very intuitive to use

Posted: 25/06/2008 11:13

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Wemb

We have recently set up nagios manually and it was quite a long boring task. there is no auto discovery and the dependency checking is pretty limited.

Yup - same story here. I set up Nagios a couple of years ago on a MiniMac to monitor our PC labs and server. Configuration was tedious and dull - so I'm going to look forward to fiddling with GroundWork.

Thanks for the UI.

Wemb

Posted: 25/06/2008 14:23

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shil1998

Thanks everyone! I'll be taking a look at Groundworks over the next few weeks. The Virtual Appliance looks like a very handy way of evaluating!