Need advice on a monitoring, reminder and warning application

Question

I am a developer that also has to monitor several things on different servers.
Such as:

1) Did all of the MS SQL databases backup last night?
2) Did all of the MySQL databases backup last night?
3) Were the database dumps actually copied to the right folder?
4) How much free space is left on each server's hard drives?
5) How big are folders "abc", "def", "etc" getting?
6) Send emails/alerts when thresholds are reached

Etc.

Just basically something to help me NOT forget such important things. I thought about writing something myself but didn't want to waste the effort if something is already out there.

I would also prefer one application instead of many if I could.

Thanks.

EDIT Forgot to mention the operating system. These run on Windows Server 2003 and/or 2008. In fact, what would be cool is a program that supports multiple servers from one machine. Something that can log into those servers.

Answer 1

The best monitoring system I have found is Nagios. Its fully scriptable and extendable, supports SNMP, etc...

The only question is - you didn't specify an operating system - Nagios is usually *NIX based...

---

Windows, eh? So Nagios is probably not for you then...

Unless you want to experiment with Nagwin? Nagios running under Cygwin...

http://www.nagios.org/news/77-news-announcements/273-introducing-nagwin-nagios-for-windows

Interesting concept - don't know how well that'd work...

Answer 2

Try Opsview it's generally for bigger environments but the community edition is free and it comes with free add-ons for different server platforms. Compared to most other server monitoring software where you are either stuck with SNMP or complicated Nagios based NRPE checks, this allows you to easily deploy custom NRPE checks and SNMP checks (based on your preference). Nagios is great but there is a bit of a learning curve, I prefer Opsview because it allows you to customize your Nagios based checks with an easy to use web UI. If you download the virtual appliance there is literally no initial setup, just launch the VM and log into the web UI. I have been testing quite a few solutions recently for my company including: Zabbix, Nagios, Nagwin, Zenoss, Whats up gold, Spice works, Ground works, and Opsview I am making my recommendation for opsview it combines ease of use and the full power of nagios all in one package. Keep in mind with any server monitoring software there is going to be a bit of a learning curve so make sure you at least read the quick start guide. If anything doesn't make sense to you with whatever solution you decide to go with, let me know since I dealt with most of the first time issue with all of them within the last month.

Answer 3

It probably depends on a number of things, but up.time's server monitoring software ( http://www.uptimesoftware.com/servermonitoring.php ) can deeply monitor across Windows, as well as VMware, AIX, Solaris, HP/UX, etx. It's designed for the mid-enterprise, so I'm not sure if that might be a bit too robust for your needs? They offer a free trial as well, so it might be worth checking out to see if it's for you.

Answer 4

I've been using ManageEngine OpManager for a while and quite like it. It can monitor a wide variety of devices using SNMP and other technologies. It's not cheap, but if you're only monitoring up to ten devices, the free version will work for you.