Server monitoring software / services

[twhiting9275]

The BEST answer to this question? A custom solution.

It really doesn't take that much to get a custom solution for monitoring developed using php / mysql .

[handsonwebhosting]

Depending on what it is that you want in your custom solution. For us to develop what we want the price tag STARTS at about $10k. I have had our own programmers and admins that have been working on various monitoring and history tracking databases over the past few months. Well over 100 hours have been placed into some of our monitoring solutions, and at a MINIMUM of $45/hour that's $4500 and the project is not complete yet. So to say that it doesn't take much depends on what it is you are talking about - time, money, patience, skill, organization?

[twhiting9275]

Conor,

While typically it will depend on what you're looking for in terms of monitoring, it really shouldn't take $10k to do a simple monitoring job. If someone spends over 100 hours working on developing a custom monitoring solution with the vast availability of tools inside php already, there's a problem.

 

From a simplistic standpoint, you can use fsockopen to check ports to make sure they're up, using the various other utilities in php to check and make sure they're running what they should (checking responses, etc).

 

For more advanced usage, php can be set to check load, memory usage, etc.

 

Put that all into a mysql database, and coordinate that on a per server/client basis and you've got a winner.

 

I think I've dumped maybe (maybe) 100 hours over the past 6 years into my own solution, which works dandy, but we've talked about that in the past

 

You're right, it does depend on the individual, what they're looking for, but, spending $10k for a monitoring solution (in house, no less), not really ideal!

[handsonwebhosting]

True - if you're just going for the basics, a simple ping/poll would work, but we want it all True server monitoring, history, inventory tracking, trend reporting, notifications, client login areas, and probably the biggest request "make it look pretty"

 

Currently we're using a few php scripts to monitor load etc on the server, along with software versions and modules installed etc, then dumping that to an HTML page. Using a PHP Scraper to then come through, dump the info into mysql on a remote server. Of course, OpenNMS was/is a pretty handy self contained program to play with too.