System monitoring

[DAve]

J. Armando Velazco Velazco wrote:
> 
> 
> On Thu, 19 Oct 2006, riccardo_diago wrote:
> 
>> hi all,
>> I'm newbie w/ freebsd.
>> i'm trying to install freebsd 6.1 to create a server only to monitoring
>> the others.
>> Anybody has experience with cacti and nagios?
> 
>     Hi! :) Nagios+MRTG for monitoring mi little network!(FreeBSD 5.4) 
> and it work very well; list of devices to monitoring:
> 
> 3 Routers
> 2 Windows 2000 servers
> 1 Windows 2003 AS
> 1 Linux SuSE Server
> 2 RHEL AS Server
> 1 Trixbox Server
> 24 Windows XP
> 
> And i have not experienced problems at least.
> 
>     Good Day.
> 
>     PS. Sorry, my english is very, very poor.

Don't apologize for knowing two languages, your english is fine ;^)

We use both Nagios and Cacti because they really do two different 
things. We use Nagios to monitor availability as it can do active checks 
of services, such as checking if http is up. It can also accept passive 
checks from other systems such as MySQL when MySQL is not listening on 
TCP. The remote machine checks locally for services, or disk space, etc 
and reports back to the Nagios machine. Nagios is very configurable as 
to how and when it alerts you to a potential problem. Nagios though will 
not record such things as interface statistics with historical data.

We use Cacti to monitor status as it retains history which can be 
'drilled down' into, it may even do alerts but we have not investigated 
that yet. We use Cacti to maintain historical data on interface 
availablity, bandwidth useage, and soon queue sizes, and web directory 
sizes.

Both are very configurable, and I think, make a good team for overall 
network monitoring and recording. We currenly monitor 12 servers for 
http, https, up status, https cert, ssh, smtp, pop, smtp-auth, ftp, 
radius, dns, and custom tests such as OSCommerce. We monitor 20+ routers 
and other equipment for useage.

Read the docs for each and experiment, there is a lot they can do.

DAve


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