What’s Your Network Really Doing?
One of the Most important aspects of any Web based solutions provider is monitoring what’s actually happening with your machines and what your customers are currently viewing, a key aspect of this is being able to monitor the traffic levels into your machine, to ensure accurate monitoring you need to ideally host these machines offsite on a completely different network to your hosted machines in order to get a third eye view on how things look.
So if you have your hosted servers currently with another provider , have a look at Dediserves current solutions which all make excellent third party monitoring servers. Below i have listed the five most powerful opensource monitoring tools which all run easily on dediserves servers.
1. MRTG - The Multi Router Traffic Grapher (MRTG) is primarily designed to monitor and graph traffic on network links. It is written in Perl, generates HTML with PNG image graphs, updated at configurable intervals. One of the best features is that it creates daily, weekly, and monthly graphs as well. You can monitor any SNMP variable you choose. MRTG is one of the most popular tools for network monitoring and is used widely in industry.
2. Nagios - Nagios goes beyond network monitoring to include notification and problem management, as well as other enterprise-class features. It has been around for over 10 years, has a large user base and support community. While some of the solutions in the top five are OS agnostic, Nagios runs on Linux or Unix. You can monitor any system or device with it, which makes it flexible in it’s usage and a more enterprise grade system.
3. Cacti / RRDTool - Cacti is a front end to RRDTool, and uses a MySQL database for data storage. Data sources can be created and customized. The front end is written in PHP. Many templates are available, as well as the option to grant users permissions to view only or create new graphs.
4. Ntop - Ntop is focused specifically on network traffic monitoring. IP traffic and protocol information & statistics. Information can be sorted or detailed by host, subnet, or viewed in total for the network. Ntop works with NetFlow and sFlow as well. Interestingly, it can be compiled for Windows as well as Unix.
5. Zenoss Core - If you’re looking for an enterprise management platform for more than just the network, but don’t have the budget for a commercial product, Zenoss has an open source alternative. Zenoss offers Professional and Enterprise versions with support and consulting available.
