[TriLUG] Jihad! ( was Remote server monitoring)

[Tarus Balog]

On Sep 1, 2005, at 12:14 PM, William Sutton wrote:

> It seems like a more sensible alternative to polling is to have  
> separate
> tools for monitoring and data collection/reporting:  Place the  
> monitor on
> the servers, and allow them to queue up reports in event of network
> problems.

Depends on what you want to monitor. I can have a program check if  
apache is running on the server, but does that mean that server is  
available in LA? New York? If all you care about is "is there an  
apache process running on this server that I can connect to, from  
this server" then, yeah. If you want to measure service availability,  
you need to measure it from the user's point of view. If Travelocity  
is slow, I go to Orbitz, whether or not the Travelocity server is  
actually up as far as they are concerned. In my case, I want to  
capture the user experience.

You can also place "agents" on systems, but agent management outside  
of what ships with a O/S can be problematic on an enterprise scale. I  
guess you could write an agent to store performance data, like CPU,  
disk, etc., and then report it up to an NMS, but many people would  
rather spend resources to fix issues with the "spotty" network and  
leave it at that.

-T

-----

Tarus Balog
The OpenNMS Group, Inc.
Main  : +1 919 545 2553   Fax:   +1 503-961-7746
Direct: +1 919 647 4749   Skype: tarusb
Key Fingerprint: 8945 8521 9771 FEC9 5481  512B FECA 11D2 FD82 B45C