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Ask Slashdot: Remote Server Support and Monitoring Solution?
New submitter Crizzam writes I have about 500 clients which have my servers installed in their data centers as a hosted solution for time & attendance (employee attendance / vacation / etc). I want to actively monitor all the client servers from my desktop, so know when a server failure has occurred. I am thinking I need to trap SNMP data and collect it in a dashboard. I'd also like to have each client connect to my server via HTTP tunnel using something like OpenVPN. In this way I maintain a site-site tunnel open so if I need to access my server remotely, I can. Any suggestions as to the technology stack I should put together to pull off this task? I was looking at Zabbix / Nagios for SNMP monitoring and OpenVPN for the other part. What else should I include? How does one put together a good remote monitoring / access solution that clients can live with and will still allow me to offer great proactive service to my servers located on-site?
Set up a script to initiate a reverse-SSH tunnel from the remote device back to a monitoring server, set up no-login on the tunnel but distribute keys for the monitoring user on the remote devices.
You should be able to passwordless login from the monitoring box over a completely secure link that doesn't require port-forwarding at the remote site.
NewRelic is pretty sweet, as the parent says, even at the free tier. They will definitely bombard your email and phone with hard-sales pitches, though, and there's a giant cost leap from free to the next tier.
Nagios is Open Source.. GPL V2 specifically..
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
For some reason, disabling ping is considered a security feature, so a lot of places block it at the firewall. Cloud services (I'm looking at you, Azure) also either doesn't allow it or can't do it.
Actually, the model of remotely-managed on-premise appliances is not that crazy. Assuming it's done securely, you get the best of both worlds:
If the customer's Internet access goes down, they're not dead in the water as they would be with a cloud solution.
If you manage everything for them, then the box is completely hands-off... just like a cloud solution.
There's an entire business category called "Managed Service Providers" whose vendors do exactly this: Remotely manage all aspects of your IT infrastructure so you don't need to worry about anything. For mom-and-pop non-technical businesses, it's an excellent model.