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Big Brother has an html interface, with lots of blinking lights - interfaces into rrdtool for your graphs and basically does a really good job of monitoring your servers and network. Extensions are easy to write in shell script or any other language you like. And there is a FREE version! http://www.bb4.com/

http://www.hobbitmon.com/

It used to be called hobbit but the lawyers representing the Tolken estate took umberage.

if Really Free isn't an issue:

Big Brother
http://bb4.com/

Hobbit/XYMON started life as an add on to big brother and grew into a full fledged monitor of it's own. Both use rrdtool for graphing. Both have a ton of plug-ins/add-ons

For a new install, I'd do hobbit/XYMON

Surely the job of a sysadmin is to get on top of everything, and then to be proactive in managing their systems. So, for me, things like Big Brother ( http://bb4.com/ ) and mrtg ( http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/mrtg/ ) are the most useful. which editor you use is just a matter of preference. Personally I'm with the author ( and with telnet too ), but that's after 20+ years of picking up bad habits

The problem is that the linuxconf apache module apparently hasn't been updated for whatever rev of apache that comes preinstalled. The first time it even writes out to the /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf file, it seriously mucks it up.

The last problem is that I'm never "off-duty". When you work in a formal office environment, people are very hesitant to call if you're not in the office. (There's a social barrier.) When you're telecommuting and they always interact with you over the phone, they can't tell that you're trying to be off-duty. Learning to say "no" helps a lot though.

Yeah. I understand. I've solved this by having three phone lines.

1) My home phone. Just for friends and the like. Nobody I work with/for *EVER* gets this number. Ever.

2) My work phone. It's on the business card. It's on the website. Anybody I work with/for gets this number, and ONLY this number.

3) My cell phone. It's mentioned on the answering message for the business phone, along with "if this is an *emergency*, call ...". I don't go *anywhere* without this on my waist.

I routinely ignore the business line on weekends / after hours. If it's important, they call the cell phone. This provides that social hesitance which is all I need to have peace on the weekends and after hours, while still being available if a server goes down. (Though, in most cases, I'd already know from a Big Brother alert.

As far as "decompression time" - I go for a jog. It's healthy, decompressing, and relieving. (Yes, I run with a cell phone!)

Big Brother

There's a vibrant community with lots of scripts to extend functionality.

It's free as in beer (but not freedom) for almost all uses, and is open source. You only have to pay if you use it to generate money.

Check out bb4.com.

I had seen Big Brother the title and I thought "What does network monitoring have to do with game design?" /me goes back to work...

Big Brother

Both are good monitoring packages, it's up to personal preference really.

When I read "network outages", I assume the poster meant computers/servers on their network going down. Now I'm guessing they meant network routers, judging by this similar posting. It looks like before you could dialup directly into AT&T's system, thus avoiding the need to use a network connection in the hopefully rare case that no network connection is available.

My suggestion is to set up a dialup account that gives limited text-based access, so that you can send the alert messages through that system. So long as the dial-up company is different than the provider of the routers' connection, that connection should stay up. And if both ISPs are down at the same time, that probably means you've got bigger problems than just your own network being down. I don't know where you'd start your search (well, I mean of course google obviously, but beyond taht...) but I'm sure you could easily find text-based internet access for around $10/month, which isn't all that much. Also, you'd have access to a remote machine you could use to test latency and other network availability issues.

If you can't stay away some hours from your email, you'd better never leave the office.

I sometimes wonder if comments like this are trolls, or just people that don't know what they're talking about. I mean, I guess I can see your point if you're the kind of person that likes to sit at the office hunched over a desk staring into the monitor checking every box repeatedly, just to make sure its still up. Personally I'd much rather go sit in the park, or at home, and let Big Brother email my phone if something dies.

Openwall Project

Orwell Project

I've user Big Brother for many years and it is very configurable. You can monitor anything from cpu usage, memory, disk space, available services, to random things like the weather and server room temp.

All that being said, I found it to be flukey in its behavoir. Sometimes it would report that everything was not responding and it had to be punted before I would get the all clear. The other negative is the license. The program consists of nothing more than shell/perl scripts so it's obviously open, but it has some strange clauses about Non-Commercial use.

Overall, I'd recommend trying something else, because BB was unreliable in my use, but YMMV.

I've user Big Brother for many years and it is very configurable. You can monitor anything from cpu usage, memory, disk space, available services, to random things like the weather and server room temp.

All that being said, I found it to be flukey in its behavoir. Sometimes it would report that everything was not responding and it had to be punted before I would get the all clear. The other negative is the license. The program consists of nothing more than shell/perl scripts so it's obviously open, but it has some strange clauses about Non-Commercial use.

Overall, I'd recommend trying something else, because BB was unreliable in my use, but YMMV.

Kind of overkill. Ever hear of Big Brother? I think it's even free! :p

Big Brother is often a good choice.

things that make monitoring, resetting, alerts and other "simple" operations like that easier. WITHOUT programming

Get Big Brother. The free version rocks.

There are many Open Source alternatives around. Big Brother, MRTG, Zabbix comes to mind.
What makes Nagios unique? Thanks.

Having a software package determine for me what servers aren't worth my attention after a certain time seems a little risky to me. I'd much rather explicitly tell a piece of software not to bug me in the middle of the night if such-and-such goes down than have it try to guess whether I should be bothered.

Nagios has been working perfect for me. Tell it that you don't care if the porn site you host on your employers' equiptment goes down between the hours of 1am and 7am and it'll leave you alone till then. I've also heard good things about Big Brother, but haven't tried it.

Big Brother is an excelent Software for this. Can be found at www.bb4.com and lots of extension are found at www.deadcat.net

One area where open-source is doing great is in monitoring projects, such as Big Brother, NetSaint , Nagios, and others. I'm curious as to why you went with a commercial product instead of a free (as in beer and speech) one.

One of the most common problems I've encountered in my years as a systems administrator is poorly managed networks. If a network is designed without the presence of mind anticpating DoS attacks, then frankly, the victim company deserves *some* of the blame for the problem.

One mid-sized ISP I worked for had been operating for 5 years prior to my employ and the network operators had never heard of monitoring tools like MRTG, RRDTool, Netsaint or Big Brother etc etc!

"We do it to ourselves and that's what really hurts" -- Radio Head.

-- Steve.

Snort combined with the equally free BigBrother gives every admin exactly what he wants. Secure net with an easy to monitor interface. If I'm not mistaken there was an article in SysAdmin not long ago about hooking Tripwire into BigBrother. The same should be able to do with Snort, shouldn't it?

/Haeger

Here's how we solved the multi-home problem despite CIDR. We wanted to make a web service (Citrix ALE) available over our T-1, or over our DSL (from a different provider) if the T-1 fails. The solution was to get a cheap Web hosting service that will use our (already registered) domain name to host a couple of static pages that point to our servers by IP address. One set of pages points to the address we got from the T-1 provider, the other points to the DSL address.

When Big Brother thinks the main connection is down, we ftp over the backup connection to the off-site web host, make the other set of pages the default, and our users now come in on the other circuit. We change the Alternate Address on the Citrix servers, and we're back in business.

The first hint that all was not well came at about 2 a.m. on Saturday, US eastern time, in the form of slow-loading pages. By 7 a.m. it was obvious that this was not a typical, easily-fixed, reboot-the-database problem. The network operations people were paged, but did not respond. Uh-oh.

It's not like a good monitoring system is hard to find.

Milalwi

Another monitoring app which I found so fun to play with I contributed code to the project is Peep: The Network Auralizer. It's certainly a unique idea for a monitoring app, and it tends to grow on you over time.

Hope this helps!

If you want to stay with self-run software I would check out either NetSaint or BigBrother, both are free. I stongly recommend NetSaint as it is easier to add custom service monitoring than BigBrother and I believe has a better interface. Big Brother however is simpler to setup and is all in Perl, so if you need to hack it up a bit, it's not too hard.

One thing no Corporation with a web site should be without is off-site monitoring. This is invaluable in determining whether people can visit your site. Two major players in this arena are RedAlert and ServiceMetrics. RedAlert runs a meer $20 per month per URL. And will test your site every 15 minutes to see if it is accessible, if it is not, it will email/page you. It also has the option of looking for a keyword in the response in order to make sure your CGI, Java, ASP is working.

ServiceMetrics is more expensive, but actually uses machines around the world to hit your site, and has more monitoring features such as variable SLAs, web-based traceroute, and HTML timing (in which they tell you give a web page, not only how long it takes to download the web page, but also how long it takes to do all the images associtated with that page, letting you know the total time for anywhere in the world.) I would strongly recommend RedAlert be added to your monitoring package.
--
He had come like a thief in the night,

I have some critical servers that I am responsible for and run network monitoring agents on these machines that poll for disk utilization, capacity, CPU load, network ping status...etc etc. Big Brother is one such network monitoring system I use. Others I have tried What's up, BMC Patrol, HP Openview. I know these do not take up much system resources, but the server needs to be 'awake' in order to collect and report network management data. Servers that are polled often do not get a chance to sleep unfortunately. Wake On Lan enabled servers will might never go to sleep if a network monitoring program is ping the server to see if it is alive every 5 minutes.

Big Brother System and Network Monitor NetSaint Network Monitor Network Monitor, Network Sniffer, Sniffer, IP Sniffer The Angel Network Monitor IPTraf - An IP Network Monitor Chesapeake's Network Monitor BigBen: Network Monitor Utility LG #28 ATM Network Monitor >> Brought to you by Google!

I use both MRTG and Big Brother for different situations and circumstances... Big Brother is pretty easy to setup and it's pages (Both Web and pager/email/call-you-in-the-middle-of-the-night-an d-piss-off-your-wife functions work almost too well :) ) MRTG has it beat hands down though as far as reporting graphs of utilization though