Episode 364: The Case for Monitoring

We cover all the bases this week in our TechSNAP introduction to server monitoring.

Why you should monitor, what you should monitor, the basics of Nagios, the biggest drawbacks of Nagios, its alternatives, and our lessons learned from the trenches.

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Links:

• Why Bother with Server Monitoring? — Once a network or server has been installed, how do you know it is working as it should? Just like a car or any appliance, it may need maintenance or parts replaced to keep it in top working order. Network and server monitoring allows the Network Administrator to see how hardware and software are performing. We can look for certain signs or warnings that the system is not working efficiently and take action to fix things to prevent system degradation or failure.
• What is Nagios? — Monitoring of network services such as SMTP, POP2, HTTP, NNTP, ICMP, SNMP, FTP, SSH.
• A Real Example Of Nagios Monitoring — There are two major problems the monitoring solves: alerting and trending. Alerting is to notify the person in charge about a major event like service failing to work. Trending is to track the change of something over time – disk or memory usage, replication lag etc.
• graphios — A program to send nagios perf data to graphite (carbon) / statsd / librato / influxdb
• Sensu — Sensu’s platform is the solution to the monitoring problems you’re facing today, and the right foundation for your organization tomorrow. From bare metal to Kubernetes—get complete visibility across every system, every protocol, every time.
• Sensu: Finally the Nagios Replacement I Have Been Looking For! – Chariot Solutions
• Icinga 2 — With the RESTful API of Icinga 2 you can update your configurations on the fly or show live information about current problems on your custom dashboards. You can process check results from third party tools or tell the Core to run actions interactively. The interface is secured with SSL. Access control can be configured fine grained and per user.
• Nagios Vs. Icinga: the real story of one of the most heated forks in free software
• Phill Barber's Blog: Nagios vs Sensu vs Icinga2
• Prometheus — Power your metrics and alerting with a leading open-source monitoring solution.
• nagios - Docker Hub — Nagios Core with Nagiosgraph, check_nrpe, custom checks & XMPP Notifications
• Previous TechSNAP Coverage: Keeping it Up | TechSNAP 20
• Dax was inspired by last weeks episode