Server monitoring

[a1isp]

Anyone use a server monitoring service to check their websites, mail, ping response etc ?

How much do you pay .. do you find the information provided much use, and has it saved you from any nasty experiences?

Do you leave it to your web host, or your web designer?

If you don't monitor services, is there any reason why?

[That Guy]

Don't bother as our host monitors 24/7 if there is a problem its almost always just needs a server reboot. So downtime is only a couple of minutes. But this has only happened around 2 times this year :)

[a1isp]

Thanks TG .. just trying to get a feel of how businesses of different sizes approach this.

[webhostuk]

We are a webhost offering several web hosting solutions.. We personally use Nagios which monitors services on our servers and immediately notifies us with a buzzer sound and email notification if something goes wrong.. That is how we monitor our servers..

Most of our clients though rely on our monitoring there are few that like to monitor their websites themselves. In such cases they use external monitoring systems such as hyperspin etc..

[greenwood-IT]

Hiya,

Being rather old school and wanting to do things on the cheap a restricted budget :)...

I have a number of servers in different locations, and each server monitors itself and another server at a remote location for a 200 response from a HTTP request and a sensible response from an SMTP server. The results of these tests are reported to my office server every 15 minutes, via a scheduled script, where an active desktop web page shows me exactly what's running where and when it was last checked.

By having each server checked by two other remote machines it's quite simple to see if the alerts are due to server or network connectivity issues. The only single point of failure is my local server which only host my development environment and monitoring setup.

In my case the desktop web page plays a siren WAV when it detects a problem and sends me an SMS message.

Remote monitoring is not that complicated, but it's important to decide what exactly needs monitoring. I generally avoid PINGs as they are less than useless for verifying a web site is up - you're far better to call a simple web page that queries the database and returns the number of users or transactions processed etc (the last entry below shows when a CCTV trigger event occurred, so I now also know cameras are working). This can then be displayed on the monitoring page which then provides a true indication that the site is working.

Chat soon.

http://www.devsys.co.uk/bigtotals.gif