Bobcares, a global leader in providing professional 24/7 Technical Support and Server Management, Software Development and Phone Support services to ISPs, Web Hosts and Data Centers announces a brand new iPhone application. The app is a well tailored solution for server monitoring and management.

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It would be a crime to claim to be a person who is interested in Open source monitoring systems, and then not talk about Zenoss. So, even though I had started the deep dive into CRMs, I thought It is my duty to come back and give it the proper respect that it deserves.

Monitoring tools have been there for a long long time. In that time they have built a large user base. The longer the users have been using the product, the tougher it is to break into the already existing market. This is where the difference between Proprietary and Open Source software come into play. The best thing about Open Source is the feel that it makes you feel…”Hell yea, I am contributing to a worthy cause. This, from now on is MY cause!!“

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Knowledge is Power. Be it war, peace, administration or day-to-day business, information about any dynamic parameter you are dealing with, adds to your strength. Imagine a day when you are idly playing a video on Youtube, and out of the blue comes a popup screaming - “Dude, you’ve got a problem. MySQL is kinda acting weird, and the server load is leaping over the moon. You better check it right away!!” Aaaah!! Life would have been so much easier! If this is what you have been dreaming about, this is exactly what Nagios can deliver.

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Monitoring and Security has always been a concern of Webhosting Industry. A web host is always in the look out of services, which will guarantee minimal downtime. Similarly, a web hosting client requires a service with which he can promise maximum uptime to his customers and gain the trust of future prospects.

Monitoring a web server essentially means alerting the server owner about the status of a service. It can be done internally where a software checks the service status and notifies the owner if some service goes down, or it can be external, where you have a web server monitoring company to the check the services status with a certain frequency.

There are many server monitoring and website monitoring tools or services available. Ideally every server you have should be monitored, every service you use, along with every domain name you own. If your server goes down for more than a certain interval of time, you should receive a message about the problem. However, if you use the aid of external monitoring companies, this can be very expensive and service fees can quickly exceed your income. You may have to end up monitoring only the most important servers or the websites of most important clients.

In addition, you will have to answer some of the major queries that arise in the mind of customers:

a) How effectively are my servers monitored ?
b) How will I monitor my servers without any external help ?
c) Am I alerted if something goes wrong in my servers

and the list goes on ….
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Ever found it frustrating that your monitoring system alerts you in the middle of the night with a false service down alert? Ever found it difficult to trust the monitoring system alerts because of the network issues in your NOC? The solution to you, is distributed monitoring. The main aim of distributed monitoring is to produce the exact result of server service checks with the help of distributed, central monitoring servers and to avoid incorrect information.

Some times due to the network problems at NOC, services will show as down, though they are not. In the distributed Monitoring system, we setup the nagios in central, distributed monitoring servers with proper modification in the configuration files. The central server sends the notification mails and others will not. So we get the exact result instead of incorrect one. The results will be more accurate if these machines (monitoring machines in the distributed setup) are located at different locations.

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ntop is a network traffic tool that shows network usage in real time. It displays a list of hosts that are currently using the network and reports information concerning the IP (Internet Protocol) and Fibre Channel (FC) traffic generated by each host. The traffic is sorted according to host and protocol. Protocols (user configurable) include:

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My dad once told me, “Even if you are holding on a thorn, hold it tightly“. Thats what came to mind , as I saw Cacti. I chose Cacti, after considering different options for resource monitoring of our linux servers. This article is all about , how I tightened my grip on the cacti , and made it work in our servers. If you are a newbie network administrator, this writeup would be really useful for a head start on resource and network monitoring using cacti.

Contents 1 Background study 1.1 Resource monitoring in Linux servers 1.2 What is RRDTOOL and SNMPD? 2 Holding Cacti 2.1 What is cacti and its features? 2.2 Why cacti? 3 Tightening the grip on Cacti 3.1 Installation. 3.2 Adding Devices and Graphs. 3.3 Configuring for localhost 3.4 Configuring for SNMPD host 3.5 Customizing 4 Other options 5 Hold me tight

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This article attempts to provide complete and easy steps for Nagios installation on a Webserver or a Local cluster.
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Many hosts advertise 99.99% uptime or anything above 99.9%. Is 99.9% any different from 99.99%. Does it make a difference to anyone. The difference is only 0.09%, for crying out loud!! Well, there is a difference.

A 99.99% uptime means 54.84 minutes of downtime a year.
A 99.9% uptime means a total of 6.91 hours of downtime a year.
A 99% uptime means 3.6 days of downtime a year!!

Web Hosting consumers need to seriously look at their Web Hosts uptime claims and compare the downtime they have faced with the figures above.

For a Web Host, does it take the same monitoring mechanism to sustain a 99.99% and a 99.90% uptime. Obviously not. But first a look at what is Uptime. Read the rest of this entry »

Load, in computing, is a measure of the amount of processing a computer system is currently performing, usually in the form of a scalar and as some variation on a percentage. - Wikipedia definition.

In a *nix variant, Server load can be calculated by the uptime, top or the w command.

[root@localhost ~]# uptime
15:33:18 up 1:33, 3 users, load average: 0.01, 0.05, 0.09

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