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?

Comments

I just discovered NewRelic ...

[WayneDV]

Check out www.newrelic.com - even their free service tier offers great features and it's easy to deploy on all servers

Re:I just discovered NewRelic ...

[astro]

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.

Re:Or you could

[Idimmu Xul]

Nagios is Open Source.. GPL V2 specifically..

Hopefully this goes without saying

[93 Escort Wagon]

Make damn sure your clients are aware of exactly what you're doing. They probably don't care about the specifics (e.g. openvpn, reverse ssh); but they need to know you can remotely access the boxes.

It's probably a good idea to have some sort of document to give them that does spell out all the specifics - something they need to acknowledge/sign, with both of you keeping copies.

Re:Hopefully this goes without saying

[dskoll]

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.

Re:Ping?

[Enry]

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.

Re:Reverse-SSH tunnel phone-home from remote devic

[BitZtream]

Or, do the right thing and hire a network admin so someone with a clue is involved.

If you have to ask this question on slashdot, you need to change the question to something appropriate. Based on exactly what was posted, he doesn't have any idea what his requirements are. He knows the conceptual goals, but not the actual goals or requirements. Unless he is trying to change careers from whatever he is to a full time network infrastructure person he is going to be wasting a lot of time getting a clue. That means time he won't be spending doing whatever his actual job is.

He needs someone who can look at his actual setup, figure what what actually needs monitored, and knows the appropriate ways to do it.

Short of multiple Bennett hasleton length posts, and many discussions in depth, no answer coming from slashdot or all of them combined is going to be useful.

Everyone here posting solutions has their own, certainly incorrect idea of what he wants but no one actually knows. No one so far has even started by asking the right questions. It's the blind leading the blind at best.