Network Monitoring

[AlphaTrinity]

Hey all,

We are looking for a network monitoring solution. Our goal is to know when and how our servers and T1s go down. The catch is that since we only have about 5 critical servers and two T1 links that we want monitored, we are looking for the cheapest solution available.

So far I've gotten a quote from up.time, and it is more expensive than what we are looking for, even though they are the cheapest I have found so far.

I know that there are a few open source monitors, but we don't have the time nor resources to spend hours and hours getting it up and running (nobody remotely savvy with Linux in our department)

Do you guys have any suggestions? If it's just a dream that something is out there that is reasonably priced, I can live with that and will put the project on hold for now.

Thanks

[kryyst]

Not being remotely savvy with linux rules out any suggestions I can give.

Perhaps if you give us a scenario of what's happening and what kind of information you want to get out of it we may be able to come up with something else.

I mean at the very least ping is a network monitoring solution that will tell you when your network went down...

[AlphaTrinity]

Our goal is simply to know when the links or servers are down.

A specific example would be when our ISP link goes down, nobody can get to our website. Our website is hosted in a different state, but because our ISP owns the DNS (a separate issue we are working on), it appears that our website is down even though in reality everything is fine. Monitoring our ISP link is the main goal of the project.

I found a company called Hyperspin who might do what we need. They monitor IPs and ports and send an SMS or email with the status. They are pretty cheap too at only $12 per test per month.

[ardichoke]

Yeah, unfortunately (well, fortunately for Linux admins like myself, unfortunately for you) what you're looking to do is generally dominated by the Linux market. At my place of employment we use a few tools... all of which are Linux based though.

Nagios - for monitoring services on our servers.
SmokePing - For watching for packet loss on our incoming lines.
Cacti - Monitoring traffic on our lines.

In the past I've also looked at Zabbix for service and system health monitoring. I know the zabbix client runs on windows but I think the server still has to be *nix. I may be wrong... but I'd say that you're either going to have to pay someone else to do the monitoring, hire a consultant to set up the monitoring software for you, or learn Linux.

[Thrax]

NAGIOS is <i>so damn good</i> that I learned my way around bash just to use it.

[kryyst]

If setting up nagios from scratch is beyond your dept skill set (and admittedly it can be a pain) there are nagios appliances created to run in vmware.