Posted by jun auza On
12/16/2010
A website or network administrator
relies on server/network monitoring software that can continuously keep
an eye on the system and can detect slow or faulty components. These
monitoring tools can automatically send updates or activate backups in
case of outages caused by server crashes or overloads, network
connections and other factors. For instance, to find out the status of a
web server, monitoring software may occasionally send an HTTP request
to fetch a page. For email servers, a test message might be dispatched
through SMTP and brought back by IMAP or POP3. In the event of status
request failures, the monitoring software may send an alarm message to
sysadmin, turn on failover systems to eliminate the problematic server
from duty until it can be fixed, or do other imperative actions.
For
those of you who are looking for monitoring tools that can handle small
to large-scale infrastructures, here is a list of some of the best
open-source server/network monitoring software that you can use for
free:
Nagios
is considered as one of the most popular if not the most popular
open-source computer network monitoring software application available.
It was originally designed to run under Linux, but other Unix variants
are also supported. Nagios provides monitoring of network services
(SMTP, POP3, HTTP, NNTP, ICMP, SNMP, FTP, SSH) and host resources
(processor load, disk usage, system logs) among others. Remote
monitoring is managed through SSH or SSL encrypted tunnels. Nagios has a
simple plugin design that gives users the freedom to effortlessly
develop their own service checks based on needs and by using any of the
supported tools that they would like. To detect and differentiate
between hosts that are down and those that are unreachable, Nagios
allows you to define network host hierarchy using 'parent' hosts. When
services or host problems arises, notification will be sent to the one
who is in charge of the network via e-mail, SMS, etc.
Zabbix
is an enterprise-class monitoring tool that is full-featured and is
commercially supported. It is capable of monitoring and tracking the
status of different kinds of network services, servers, and other
network hardware. Zabbix has great visualization functionalities
including user-defined views, zooming, and mapping. It has a versatile
communication method that allows quick and uncomplicated setup of
different types of notifications for pre-defined events. Zabbix has
three primary modules: server, agents, front-end. To store monitoring
data, you can use MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, or SQLite as your database.
Without installing any software on the monitored host, Zabbix allows
users to verify the availability and responsiveness of standard services
such as SMTP or HTTP. To monitor statistics such as CPU load, network
utilization and disk space, a Zabbix agent must be installed on host
machine. Zabbix includes support for monitoring via SNMP, TCP and ICMP
checks, IPMI and custom parameters as an option to installing an agent
on hosts.
Cacti
is a web-based graphing tool that is designed as a complete frontend to
RRDtool's data storage and graphing utility, which allows users to
monitor and graph CPU load, network bandwidth utilization, network
traffic, and more. It can be utilized to configure the data collection
itself, enabling particular setups to be monitored without any manual
configuration of RRDtool. Cacti allows you to poll services at preset
period and graph the resulting data. It is mainly used to graph
time-series data of metrics such as CPU load and network bandwidth
utilization. Cacti can be expanded to monitor any source via shell
scripts and executables. It also supports plugin architecture and has a
large and active community that has gathered around the Cacti forums
providing handy scripts, templates, and tips on writing plugins.
Zenoss
Based on the Zope application server and written in Python, (Zenoss Core) is a server and network management platform that combines
original programming and several open source projects to integrate data
storage and data collection processes via web-based user interface. It
allows users to monitor availability, inventory/configuration,
performance and events. Zenoss Core is capable of monitoring
availability of network devices using SNMP, SSH, WMI, network services
(HTTP, POP3, NNTP, SNMP, FTP) and host resources (processor, disk usage)
on most network operating systems. A plug-in architecture provided by
ZenPacks allows community members to extend its functionality. ZenPacks
are encapsulated in Python eggs and supplies instrumentation and reports
for monitored infrastructure units.
Munin
Like Cacti, utilizes RRDTool to present output in graphs through a web interface.
It has a master/node architecture in which the master links to all the
nodes at regular intervals and asks them for data. Using Munin, you can
quickly and easily monitor the performance of your computers, networks,
SANs, and applications. It makes it uncomplicated to spot the issue when
a performance problem occurs and clearly see how you're doing capacity
wise on all restricted resources. For Munin’s plugin, its main priority
is on simple plug and play architecture. It has plenty of monitoring
plugins available that will easily work without a lot of modification.
If you know of other free and open-source server/network monitoring software, you may share them with us via comment.
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