Server Monitoring Alerts

[Vini]

We've never been a company that has relied on 24/7 uptime, which may sound surprising. But recently we've experienced various problems with our Exchange box that has (typically) being noticed by our MD.

To put his mind at ease I'm looking into systems that will fire off text's to X, Y and Z to inform them of potential problems.

Does anyone know of any useful software that's worth looking at?

I'm concerned that there'll be too many false positives, but don't really know much about this area.

The majority of our kit is built up of Proliant ML370's with 2003SE. The server we're most bothered about right now is a Server 2003 running 64bit with Exchange 07.

[Jiff Lemon]

Depends on what you want to monitor. There's a plethora of products out there ranging from simple up/down monitoring to component level monitoring.

GFI, Nagios, Big Brother, System essentials, Opsmanager.......

[gss03]

We use Kaseya to manage about 50 SBS server and about 600 workstations.
Works brilliantly for checking your servers are up and running and you can set monitoring up to alert you when any service or process fails. Its uses are endless.

[Jay]

Nagios gets my vote

[madman045]

We use Kaseya to manage about 50 SBS server and about 600 workstations.
Works brilliantly for checking your servers are up and running and you can set monitoring up to alert you when any service or process fails. Its uses are endless.

How does the pricing per server per module work out with Kaseya?

We have been using Hounddog with relative ease and low cost

[Vini]

We've lost connectivity to Exchange once a month for the past three months, each for different reasons, each time at a weekend and each time noticed typically by the MD.

Normally one of us in the department notices it and has it up and running within a couple of hours, however, this weekend none of us were available/noticed, except of course the MD.

I guess just notifying us if Exchange is down is what we're after, don't care why it's down particularly (at the time of being notified), but just need to know...

As for how to monitor/what to monitor, that's what I'm not sure about. The first time we lost connectivity was due to our leased line going down. There was SFA we could do here.

The second time was user error, with one of our offices sending a huge amount of 15mb emails (nice!).

This last time appears to be down to Kaspersky crapping out and taking a service with it. Unfortunately, there's nothing in the way of Errors in the Application logs, which leaves us in the dark, and makes monitoring it difficult.

[gss03]

How does the pricing per server per module work out with Kaseya?

We have been using Hounddog with relative ease and low cost

Pricing for Kaseya just depends on how you want it.
We have gone down the hosted route with a cost per agent we put out there.
You can also go down the route of hosting it yourself, but then you are also responsible for the hardware it sits on, plus the licencing, then the kaseya licence on top of that.

I think for Kaseya we pay about 2.50 per server agent per month.

We've also used hounddog in the past, but moved swiftly away from then when we adopted Kaseya.

[Splash]

PRTG is free to use for up to 10 sensors and will happily monitor WMI for you. Might be worth setting up as a test and then look into payware if needed? Nagios is also pretty awesome, but takes a chunk more setting up in my experience.

[Barrichello]

Nagios gets my vote

Yep Nagios all the way. Works perfectly across Windows/Unix distros

[Jiff Lemon]

I'd say give GFI a whirl for what you need; Why?

30 day free trial. Pre built rules for Exchange 2007 (and I think Kapersky too).

[Vini]

Cheers guys, will have to find some time to try these now!