Central monitoring software needed. Does it exist?
August 26, 2008 10:24 AM   Subscribe

There has to be a program that does this - user configurable Service Level monitoring of other systems, with 'actionable' events

... caution... non-technical guy trying to talk about technical stuff...

Here's what I am looking for... a software package (to be integrated with my company's software) that, either via push or pull, collects information (likely quantifiable numerical data, but not necessarily) from other systems deployed at a customer site. We could define the package I am looking for as a 'central' system and the others as 'input' systems.

The central system would then, based on user-definable metrics, invoke actions (e-mails, pager alerts, etc) when measurements/thresholds from the input systems reach a certain level - the rub is that it (the threshold) would often be based on a combination of inputs from more than one system.

Easy (potentially nonsensical) example: there's a thermostat and a humidity detector in a rooom - each has a 'system' attached to it that monitors the temperature and the humidity. Those individual systems could easily tell me when the temperature reaches X OR the humidity leve reaches Y, respectively. But what I am looking for is central a system that would tell me when both events occur at the same time - that is, when the temperature reaches X AND the humidity reaches Y - something that each individual input system cannot do.

This central system I am referring to could allow the user to define what X and Y (and Z, etc) would need to be and how often the threshold would need to be reached over a given time period - that is, the user defines what is important and how he wants to be alerted. To continue the example above, maybe the user is only interested if the conditions are met twice in a 24 hour period, and so the central system would only define an 'action' when the condition(s) is/are met a second time in the past 24 hours...

Are there any companies that have something like this? I'm trying to be somewhat generic, because there's a wide variety of input systems that could be hanging off of this central system...

Network monitoring SLM systems come close, but not certain that's the right approach.
posted by dyerfr to Computers & Internet (7 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: Nagios. Designed for network monitoring. You'll need your local uber-geek to get it running, but it will monitor just about anything you can hook up to a TCP/IP network.
posted by taubman at 11:04 AM on August 26, 2008


Yep, nagios. I don't know that it's THAT hard to set up. It can monitor anything - if one of the built in scripts won't do it, you can make your own.
posted by RustyBrooks at 11:14 AM on August 26, 2008


Nagios, BMC Patrol, HP OpenView, Mercury SiteScope.

There are a lot of monitoring/management tool sets that do this, but Nagios is free and widely supported by a broad community.

There are companies that specialize in the development and deployment of all of the above for a customers infrastructure.
posted by iamabot at 11:28 AM on August 26, 2008


Nthing Nagios. It's not that hard to set up. There's even a VMware Virtual Appliance you can play with. It took me this book before I was completely comfortable with it, but it's an amazing tool and very flexible.
posted by eafarris at 11:40 AM on August 26, 2008


openNMS and Big Brother are other alternatives, but I'd probably look to nagios myself.
posted by jenkinsEar at 12:47 PM on August 26, 2008


Zenoss is good if Nagios doesn't offer you the bells & whistles you want.
posted by doteatop at 3:54 PM on August 26, 2008


N-thing Nagios here as well, but also 2nd-ing Zenoss. Zenoss seems to be able to do all that Nagios does and more. With that functionality comes some added complexity. I have configured Zenoss to graph/alert based on custom data provided via SNMP and custom commands on a remote system.
posted by bxg at 10:51 PM on August 27, 2008


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