Simple Server Monitor is what it says. It monitors your servers - on ping, HTTP, SMTP and/or POP - and screams like a stuck parrot if anything goes down.* It also plots little graphs of response times. Not fancy, but it fills the immediate need.

I also tried out Spiceworks, which is kind of neat, but really designed for monitoring small office networks. It's written in Ruby (using Rails), and runs in the background, accessed through your browser. For a Web app, it's pretty neat, though for a monitoring system it gives me a great deal of information I don't want. Doesn't seem to like monitoring the web servers, either.

Zenoss is probably quite good if you work with SNMP 7 days a week. Otherwise, avoid. The simplest way to set it up involves downloading a pre-packaged virtual machine and running it under VMWare.

PortSensor is another simple monitoring tool, but a very flexible one since you can have it execute custom shell scripts remotely via SSH and process the results using regular expressions. Naturally I'd rather not do any of that, and it doesn't have any particularly significant functionality built in. It's more a sort of monitoring toolkit.

Simple Server Monitor I'm keeping until I find something better; the others have hit the bit bucket.

* Well, that last is due to the alert sound I chose.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:56 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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