Your recommended server monitoring tool ?

[bcostacurta]

Hello,

I'm looking for a server monitoring tool.
The software requirements are :

- web interface via server Apache
- graphs (even basic), eg. via RRDTool
- storage : flat/proprietary files or MySQL
- licence GPL / Open Source (look obvious on this forum..)
- optional : Debian packages

There is only one host to monitor and the monitoring tool will be local hosted on it.
Monitoring will be rather basic, and about standards services : memory, CPU, MySQL, network, Postfix + Dovecot, proFTPd.

After some googling I found the following potential products :

Cacti
Zabbix
NetXMS
Observium
Pandora FMS
Shinken
Munin
other ?


Well, I hope my request is complete and clear enough to grab your attention.
Thanks for your advice and experiences.

Bye,
Bruno

[Irithori]

It comes down to:
first) requirements and
second) personal taste.

My datacenters are monitored via Xymon
Views -> Main View gives you an overview of your groups (if you decide to create groups)
One more click leads to a nice X Y grid of your servers, showing all the individual tests.


Then there is Views -> All non green
With one page, you know what is wrong.

And the history there is worth gold.
As a simple example:
Say your site is down, web checks, databases, etc are blinking red.
The history tells you, that a database server went down first.

It doesnt take too much guessing now, where to log in and check first

[atreyu]

I second Xymon (aka Big Brother aka Hobbit)

I like the fact that it is mostly Bash (easy to see what's going on behind the scenes)

And how easy it is to make custom tests

[kprojects]

Nagios and NagioSQL - it can monitor anything and everything.

[scorpion9]

About nagios, ive heard its dead.

But another and better solution is Zabbix. It should be open source and free, with nice gui.