jasun's blog

System monitoring applications & services

I've been looking at various system monitoring applications. I've come over and used a few in the past, such as Big Brother. I've taken a recent look at BB and although it is good, I think a combination of this or another application and a third party monitoring service would be better so I've been looking around at paid services that can allow for monitoring of multiple servers and their services from various locations. Of course, there is a monthly cost attached but the options included for alarm notification are increased.

Although the notifications that I've found with software such as BB is good, paid for services allow for more control and variation in methods used for notification. One of the ones I've looked at is Alertra which seems to be quite popular with a lot of people. It allows you to setup notification via email, sms phone call, MSN and more although it does not monitor server internals. A third party monitoring service that allows for this would be good, I'm sure there must be one, obviously you would need to run an application on the system though.

The phone call option with Alertra is only available to the USA & Canada but the rest is available globally. I'm sure there are other paid for services and free ones also that are good so I'll have to check some more out and compare. I'll also have to see if there are any other monitoring applications that will be good for what I'm looking for. The other option would be a custom developed one either by a third party or our team but with everything else going on at the moment, something ready built and that just works would be great for now.

If anyone knows of a good system I should check out, let me know, it's looking like Alertra will do the job for now and maybe for quite some time depending on how good it works out to be. A future project will be to design and build our own system to a custom specification or have someone else do it.

Having the application monitoring allows for things such as disk space and CPU usage to be monitored, using most web based monitors don't allow for this which is where BB and other systems come in as they can monitor internally and externally, especially with BB as it can act as a distributed system. I will have a combination of both, to allow for more detailed monitoring of internal server statistics as well as from the outside to monitor web services from different locations.