sender: "Les Mikesell" date: "Fri, Mar 31, 2006 at 11:55:30AM -0600" <<<EOQ
On Fri, 2006-03-31 at 08:33, Kai Schaetzl wrote:
I use Argus for monitoring and alerting: http://argus.tcp4me.com ...Initially I was almost going to write a full essay about how much and why I like it :)
I'm using bigsister at the moment. Argus looks similar and not similar. I may want to try it out. How does it remote monitoring? Only by SNMP or is there an agent application available (short glimpse over the documentation doesn't reveal one)? I'm not familiar with SNMP at all, so it's not an option for me.
I've also had 'spong' http://spong.sourceforge.net/ running for close to 10 years and it still works great although some of the others may be easier to set up. It doesn't have SNMP at all but does network probes from a central location and has an optional local agent for additional information. A nice touch is that it has a message throttling mechanism where you can have it notify you about problems but limit both the number of times for any particular notification and the number of total notifications it will send. If the machine doing the probing looses network connectivity for a while it won't page you thousands of times.
Nice, that's one feature I like very much in Argus too :D Besides that it has escalation features, that are also very useful:
--- quote http://argus.tcp4me.com/notif.html --- Escalating
After attempting to notify someone of a problem repeatedly, you may want to try notifying someone else:
escalate: 10 qpage:manager; 30 qpage:cio; 60 qpage:ceo
which means:
* after 10 minutes page the manager * after 30 minutes page the CIO * after 1 hour page the CEO --- end --- Of course you can send emails too, instead of paging people :) And it may be a good ideea to notify your coleagues, if a problem is not solved within a certain amount of time, before notifying your manager :D
All the best, Alex