How To Build a Simple Open Source Server Monitoring Solution With Mobile Support 58
reifman writes "Nothing sucks more than finding an 'Error establishing database connection' on your blog hours after the fact, but it's not easy to find inexpensive, simple monitoring solutions which support smartphone notifications. I wrote MonitorApp, a free, open source software applet which sends notifications to your iPhone (or Android) if anything goes wrong with your web site or services. This tutorial describes how to install and configure MonitorApp for your own purposes. The only cost is a $4.99 mobile application called Pushover — which links MonitorApp to your phone. Pushover also links with Nagios, a more complex open source option — but ironically, Nagios' website was down when I looked for it last month."
Try Zabbix, it's free (Score:5, Informative)
Why reinvent the wheel (and charge for it!) if you can get a more mature and complete solution for free?
http://www.zabbix.com/
Mobile integration:
http://www.zabbix.com/third_party_tools.php
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to expand on this, zabbix has built-in email, gsm modem and jabber/xmpp support. of course, it can just run your script to do all kind of magic, too :)
disclaimer - i'm working on zabbix for a few years now :)
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oh, forgot, there's also built-in support for a commercial messaging provider in north america, eztexting
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zabbix blows goats.
I tried using zabbix (I do snmp/nms stuff for a living) and zabbix was so non-snmp based and non-snmp friendly, I gave up and didn't look back. no native snmp support or trap support and you have to use old contrib code (not supported) to patch the existing product to get it to be snmp-ready. even then it sucks badly.
sorry to burst your bubble, but zabbix is just not worth much if you do any snmp-based monitoring. if your nms can't support snmp natively, something is horribly wrong in
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It seems Zabbix isn't well suited for the use cases you care about. That's fine, but it should be noted that your preference for SNMP-based offerings is far from universal. I've dealt with environments where thousands of systems across several continents were constantly monitored without SNMP, and things worked very well.
You seem quite interested in forcibly proclaiming your preference for certain modes of monitoring. Are you equally prepared to discuss the security implications [wikipedia.org] of those choices? Are all de
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i'm wondering which version that must have been, as zabbix has natively supported snmp since... i might be off by a couple of years here, but 2001 or so.
snmp trap support was improved with 2.0, which came out more than a year ago.
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I'll support your suggestion too, I've been installing Zabbix for a lot of my customers, especially since version 2.0 came out it's a really strong product that does everything you could want from a monitoring solution.
I use SiteUptime.com (Score:3)
They are cheap, they support content recognition, are globally disperse, and they have good notification.
We wrote a simple page that does a DB query and returns "OK" if everything succeeds. Point SiteUptime to that sub-URL and monitor the content for "OK"
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Seconded, Zabbix with the ZAX Android client works very well in my setup here (sometimes too well, I hate getting alerts at 3am).
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Re:Try Zabbix, it's free (Score:4, Informative)
you absolutely do not need any paid component to do notifications. actually, one of the biggest things about zabbix is that it's true opensource - no "open core" or other bullshit, it's all open source. of course, anybody is free to put out some proprietary application, but anything zabbix team does is opensource.
as for notifications, you can do email, sms, jabber/xmpp and eztexting using the built-in methods, and you can easily extend this without paying for any application
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I'm desperately looking for a new NMS. We're using What's Up Gold now and I can't stomach paying them another cent. We've fiddled with Zenoss and OpenNMS and pretty much anything else we can get our hands on.
Looking for:
Truly open source
SNMP performance graphing
TCP/UDP service monitoring
ICMP polling
Interface status monitoring (up/down)
That's really pretty much all
Far cheaper answer (Score:2)
The much cheaper and better option is to just have nagios send something to your phone. This can be done via email, email to sms gateway, jabber, or loads of other simple methods.
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The much cheaper and better option is to just have nagios send something to your phone. This can be done via email, email to sms gateway, jabber, or loads of other simple methods.
This. I am tempted to find out how this pushover app's author is connected to either slashdot or the original submitter, but I won't bother. Its a nice app if you find yourself managing a TON of diverse alerting sources, or if you are trapped in some sort of SMTP black hole, but if not (like this hypothetical case) just have it generate an email instead of taking the time to bother with "yet another app". SMTP is there for you, it's already on your phone, and it works really well (unlike push systems whi
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or even hobbit (er, I mean xymon).
xymon is not ultra complex to configure or change (its all simple C code underneath) and we've had good luck using xymon for alerting via email/sms.
the display is mostly 'idiot lights' that change color, but for monitoring, it gets the job done even though its not sexy.
Thanks for the ad (Score:3, Funny)
I will be sure to drop $5 on this pushover app, since certainly "Nothing sucks more than finding an 'Error establishing database connection' on your blog hours after the fact". Yep, not breaking my arm, or getting a speeding ticket, or having to watch my son cry uncontrollably as he get his shots at the doctor. None of those things compares to the thought that my blog was inaccessible for all of its millions of nonexistent readers. Thanks again, SlashNOT.
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Mod publisher down
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Ohhhh, you meant the other kind of "parent"....
Re:Thanks for the ad (Score:4, Funny)
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This "story" is still a crappy ad.
News for nerds? (Score:2)
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Good thing no one ever lies.
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"... than people advertizing their paid products and services in Slashdot posts." ...and taking Slashdot people for idiots.
"it's not easy to find inexpensive, simple monitoring solutions which support smartphone notifications"
Are you kidding? It's stupidly easy. Nagios, Icinga, Zabbix, Pandora, Ganglia, Zenoss and dozens of others I forgot about can do that. Heck, monitoring is probably one of the biggest categories in open source devlopment and using a gateway to whatever is trivially easy in all of the
Better solution (Score:1)
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"Simply send an e-mail to a special e-mail address and you'll get a notification on your iPhone."
What about "simply send an e-mail to *your* e-mail address and you'll get a notification on your mail client, be it desktop, laptop, iPhone, Android or whatever"?
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"The reason for this, is a lot of us want a tiered response level."
Me too.
"Email should be something that can wait until you're in the office again. Text and phone calls are for immediate attention 24x7"
Because?
No, seriously, because?
It can be argued that SMS/pager *when done properly* and, of course, on fully owned hardware, can be more resilient than email but other than that, it's stupid to say "email should be something that can wait till tomorrow, text is for immediate" action". Please, think a bit ab
Not completely free (Score:1)
Nagios.org is not down (Score:1)
Or use Unagi (Score:2)
I have Unagi on my phone and it makes it simple. Yeah it's a bandwidth hog, but a simple and helpful interface.
BTW the paid product placement is lame.
Icinga (Score:2)
Icinga [icinga.org] is the community-oriented fork of nagios. My experience was: write a c patch for nagios core to fix an annoying behavior (re: alerting correctness), put it up on the nagios list, get no response, a week later get a mail from the icinga dev team saying that the patch is really great and would it be OK if they used it in icinga (not required by license, they were just being polite).
After maintaining my own private branch of nagios for a while, now I get icinga from rpmforge with the patch already inte
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It's pretty much the bog standard open source stereotype.
You really should stop using saying that you utterly fail to understand the meaning of, it just makes you look ignorant.
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You really should stop using saying that you utterly fail to understand the meaning of, it just makes you look ignorant.
What ever are you talking about?
Timothy needs to be fucking fired. (Score:2)
Seriously?
How to build blah blah blah ...
Down load the zabbix or nagios virtual machine, run it, done.
Why do you have articles about shit that wasn't difficult or new when slashdot fucking started?
Instead you're just posting stupid slashvertisements from people because you're too ignorant to know the difference between common knowledge and a challenge.
You need to spend less time worrying about those stupid fucking pointless videos you do and more time understanding that technology is more than a way for you
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nagios and the rest of the so-called free NMS's fall down horribly in terms of features unless you buy the commercial version.
I hate that!
our company did an eval of most of the free NMS tools and avoided most of them since the freebie version was mostly just a way to get you to buy the paid-for version. the paid-for versions all look good but we did not want to have to buy stuff.
we took xymon, added our own poller, trap receiver engine and some other goodies and it did not take too much effort to do that.
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nagios and the rest of the so-called free NMS's fall down horribly in terms of features unless you buy the commercial version.
I hate that!
oh, i'd hate as well... but to shamelessly plug zabbix again, it is true opensource - no closed components, plugins, enterprise versions, "pro" addons... what you get on sourceforge is what everybody else gets.
not that zabbix wouldn't benefit from more built-in features, but at least it's not an attempt at the "first shot is free" business model :)
It's about balancing complexity & simplicity (Score:2)
still requires a 3rd party server, right? (Score:2)
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SMS is free(ish) (Score:2)