[TriLUG] Jihad! ( was Remote server monitoring)

[William Sutton]

Hmmm...

The question wasn't entirely theoretical.  We have an in-house developed 
system monitoring tool at $WORK to make sure that our servers aren't being 
bogged down by manufacturing processes (a lot of back-end stuff going on 
with databases and so-on).  We also have a large worldwide VPN where 
segments run over hardware we don't own or control.  Consequently, fixing 
the outages isn't an option...

FWIW....

On Thu, 1 Sep 2005, Tarus Balog wrote:

> 
> 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
> 
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> 
> Tarus Balog
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