Network and Server monitoring

[Scot L. Harris]

On Sat, 2005-09-10 at 11:03, Jonathan Carpenter wrote:
> I am looking for a way to monitor my servers status. I am also wanting
> to monitoring specific process or daemons as well and alert me when
> there is an issue either by email or pager. I would also like to have
> some sort of IDS or log checking that will alert me when there is a
> lot of activity in my secure log or messages log out of the ordinary.
> My network is blocking icmp packets so I cannot ping each server at
> the current time. Can anyone recommend anything for me? Any help would
> be greatly appreciated.
>  
>          Thanks,

You probably want to take a look at something like Big Brother or
Hobbit.  OpenNMS and Nagios are other options you can use.  They require
a little more effort to setup than Big Brother.  Any of these can be
used to monitor systems and services on your network.  

I liked the display that Big Brother provided.  (I think Hobbit is very
similar).  OpenNMS and Nagios would probably scale better in very large
networks.  

Have not used Hobbit but have worked with the other three.  Not allowing
icmp means you will need to use an agent on the systems you are
monitoring or use SNMP.  I know Big Brother has an agent for most OSes. 
Been awhile since I used Nagios and OpenNMS, don't remember if they had
a specific agent or just used SNMP.