[CentOS] - monitoring software

[Les Mikesell]

On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 12:34 PM, John R Pierce <pierce at hogranch.com> wrote:
>
> On 10/18/2013 5:49 AM, Paolo De Michele wrote:
> > I have a dedicated server with several services running: ssh, ftp, httpd
> > (with several sites andactive domains), the mail server (dovecot,
> > postfix), dns.
> >
> > I'd like to monitor all of these services in a graphical, easy, setting
> > of thresholds and alerts via email.
> > I would also like that if a customer wanted to see the graphs I could
> > create codes read-only.
>
> to echo whats already been said, and perhaps clarify...
>
> Nagios is the classic alert package.   while its usually run on a
> dedicated server and monitors a bunch of other servers, it certainly can
> be used on a single system.   But, Graphing in Nagios is a bit of a pain.
>
> Cacti is a excellent graphing package, same thing, its usually run on a
> central server that monitors lots of stuff on other servers, it can be
> run on the same machine.   however, setting up alerts in Cacti is
> difficult.    You may find older references to 'mrtg', well, mrtg was
> rewritten as rrdtool, and rrdtool is the basis of Cacti.
>
> both of these systems have web based displays, and use 'agent' based
> data collection.   Its not unusual to use both at once for their
> respective strong points.
>
> with any of these systems, you typically have a line in the agent script
> for each thing you want to monitor on a given host.   utility scripts
> such as check_postgresql.pl let you get extensive data out of postgres
> databases
>

There is also OpenNMS: http://www.opennms.org.   Probably overkill for
a single host, but good if you intend to scale up and since a yum
repository is maintained, installing isn't bad.  It normally uses snmp
and remote probes of network protocols instead of a dedicated local
agent, but does have the ability to use some NRPE stuff from nagios if
you want.    Don't think there is a usable 'read only' login for
outsiders but it does have an embedded jasper reports server for
publishing fancy reports that can be emailed as pdfs.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com