I would second the suggestion for using nagios, but definitely use
Groundwork's product, Monarch, which is a combined package of nagios and a
PHP front-end to the nagios interface. Once installed you can configure the
whole thing through a web-browser.
It does take some time to set up, but it is worth it, as you can set custom
thresholds to everything from monitoring disk space on remote machines to
custom TCP/UDP checks to see if services are running. We use SSH-based
checks for all of our remote machines, including checking our oracle
databases. I don't work for Groundwork, but I have posted a document on
their message boards that details how to set up SSH-based checks. It adds a
little bit of overhead versus NCSA based checks, but I think it's worth the
security.
Here's the link:
http://www.groundworkopensource.com/community/forums/viewtopic.php?p=3272
Best of all, their open source product is still free. They do have a version
that is not however.
-----Original Message-----
From: listbounce@securityfocus.com [mailto:listbounce@securityfocus.com] On
Behalf Of Steven Hollingsworth
Sent: Friday, September 28, 2007 2:18 PM
To: Adam Savage
Cc: security-basics@securityfocus.com
Subject: Re: Performance Monitoring Software
On Fri, Sep 28, 2007 at 02:41:19PM -0400, Adam Savage wrote:
[snip]
My new question is pertaining to performance monitoring software.
Microsoft Operations Manager is a little to pricey for us I believe and
was wondering if there is any other software out there that will do
baseline performance monitoring of my servers.. They are all Windows
2000/2003 servers but it doesn't have to be a windows based utility.
I've looked at HP's Performance Monitoring Pack that integrates with
HPSIM but that's pricey also.
I'd recommend nagios [0] which has plenty of plugins that can monitor
various windows components if installed [1]. Also there is
the Monarch user interface [2] which has an open source version to
manage the nagios server and control what hosts/services are being
monitored.
Nagios can be a bit unwieldy to get off the ground by itself.
Groundwork Monarch makes the process much easier.
(see bootable ISO || Vmware Image)
You'll still have to get your hands dirty configuring the agents that
are going to monitor the windows server, but the nagios app is solid
and I've been happy with it for years.
[0] - http://www.nagios.org/download/
[1] - http://www.nagiosexchange.org/
[2] - http://www.groundworkopensource.com/downloads/mon_download.html
Thanks!
-Adam
HTH,
~ stevo
