Server Monitoring Solutions?

bwhaley asks: "The University I work for has asked me to research software solutions for server monitoring. More specifically, a piece of software that will monitor server variables such as load, swap usage, POP/IMAP processes, total processes, and all the other interesting data about a server's health. Watching these variables can give administrators advance warning about potential problems with the server. We are currently using an in-house solution written in Perl but its age is showing. I have found plenty of proprietary solutions such as HP OpenView and Sun Management Center, but these cost thousands of dollars. What solutions do Slashdot readers use? Are there any powerful open source solutions that I'm missing? Is anyone else running homegrown software that they are happy with? We are running an entirely Solaris environment but I am interested in any UNIX solution."

Comments

CompSci students?

[agent dero]

I would suggest talking to whoever teaches computer science and software. Get the kids doing this for an education to rewrite your perl scripts that do the same job.

That's something you can pass off as helping everybody, saving y'all money and teaching compSci kids how to work with the computers and OSes

Re:Nagios

[Sentry21]

I second Nagios. I set it up as a technology test I was doing a while back to monitor our internal network and some remote servers (arbitrary web servers on the internet) for a lark - got it telling uptime, system load, swap, memory usage, processors, network load and the like on our Linux and Win2K machines (including various network interfaces - when the wired interface on the laptop was disconnected, it paged me - useless for our situation, but good for multihomed machines).

It can monitor all kinds of machines, services, ports, networks, pings, traceroutes, anything. Beautiful setup, and highly recommended.

--Dan