HostMonitor is nice enough. We never really found it to be 100% effective as sometimes it was give an alert on a server that wasn't down. Eventually I came across Netsaint and then Nagios(what netsaint became) ... Nagios is pretty much perfect. And it's free to boot. Try www.nagios.org.
-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Dan Sorenson Sent: Thursday, February 23, 2006 12:45 AM To: hlds@list.valvesoftware.com Subject: [hlds] Server monitoring on the cheap In my real-life job as a systems and network engineer I was given a task of finding a product that would monitor both my netwerkin stuff so far as ports and stats, as well as Windows server processes, and concentrate on things that don't cost an arm and a leg and a co-worker's salary per year. Well, there went HP Openview. So I evaluated a dozen or so and found a suprise find that I can't recommend, but might be worth checking out. It's not quite for a co-location company, and not quite for a Fortune 500 company, but for the smaller shops I thought it worth at least mentioning. I can't recommend it because it's HostMonitor 5 from KS Software. http://www.ks-soft.net on your internet dial. I've not found much on the company and near as I can tell it's probably one guy coding late into the night in his PJ's with a bottle of vodka at his side and muttering swear words at Microsoft in Russian. Or maybe that's just me. On the other hand, his HostMonitor product beat the crap out of stuff costing twenty times the price, per year, and though it's not the prettiest web-page, giving the health of your NOC for under $1000 I can live with ugly web pages, log to a SQL server, and make my own pretty reports for manglement. On the netwerkin' side you have to supply the MIB to query. That's a pain when you've routers with 20 different interfaces since this doesn't automatically identify them as Int FastEthernet0/0 on a Cisco 3745. Frankly, I don't care about that so much as this thing will query Windows Perfmon stats. Want to know CPU usage? It's there. Want to scan event logs? It's there. Want to telnet to port 27015 and look for a response? It's there. How about the status of a single process that isn't a service? It's there. Alerts can be escalated, yadda yadda yadda. Read the fluff on the web page above. I don't buy all that stuff either, and I'm still playing with it against my own network, but at this sort of price I can afford to do at least premliminary scans with it and use the more specific tools for other tasks and save on licensing fees. The support for external batch files, VB scripts, and such are just icing on the cake. Just thought I'd throw it out there for your consideration. I've no connection with the company, never even knew they existed prior to a couple of weeks ago, and honestly I think other products do it better. But at his prices I don't care if I get a license and he has a heart attack tomorrow, I'm saving a wad of cash over the flashier products and that makes me look good on mahogany row. - Dan * Dan Sorenson DoD #1066 A.H.M.C. #35 [EMAIL PROTECTED] * * Vikings? There ain't no vikings here. Just us honest farmers. * * The town was burning, the villagers were dead. They didn't need * * those sheep anyway. That's our story and we're sticking to it. * _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlds _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlds
