I just started at a new company, and want to monitor the hardware to see when drives are going bad or c: drives are full. I'd like something that's free. In my old job, we used freemyit.com or gfi.com, but this company is pretty low key and doesn't want to spend the monthly charges. Anyone know of a solution like this?

 

-----signature-----

When I asked a little while back they said Nagios! and I'm a convert now too.

 

-----signature-----

Yep, i'd say nagios is your best bet. it'll take awhile to get set up and everything initially configured but hey it's free. they do have a pay version available too but i've never used it.

 

-----signature-----

Cool.. i'll have to check it out.

 

-----signature-----

If you're looking a commercial solution, What's Up is a pretty cheap package. They have various versions (or at least they did when I used it), some are pretty cheap and others more expensive. It's really customizable. It comes with a lot of built-in monitors using SNMP, WMI, and vbscript. There's also a healthy forum group that shares all kinds of monitors. I used it at an old job with only 60-80 Windows servers at any time and maybe ten Unix, six or eight switches (years ago, I forgot), and a really small SAN. I monitored everything from CPU usage, disk usage, the utilization of the switches (ports, CPU, etc), utilization of some of the storage arrays, had it field all SNMP traps for errors, custom monitors to make sure web-based apps were responding (you can script up a series of queries and read the HTML that is returned), etc. You can set up call groups so it pages the people that need to be paged for each issue, group or type of server, etc. I accomplished all of that in about two months, and at the time had never done much with enterprise monitoring. I want to say that all together it set the company back about $4000, but that may even be a bit high and/or included several years of maintenance. Here's the link: http://www.ipswitch.com/

Aside from that sorry, only used obscenely expensive stuff for massive organizations like SCOM or OVO.

Oh and generates pretty and elaborate reports to impress pointy head boss types.

 

-----signature-----

Welcome to my world...



...and may $DEITY have mercy on your soul.



Uh, nagios comes with and can do literally everything you listed and doesn't cost a dime?

 

-----signature-----

Nagios is free.

MRTG is free and will give you some nice trending info. You can chart bandwidth and disk usage, well really anything you want from SNMP.

Cacti is like MRTG but has a web-front end (i.e. easier but security concerns)

Whatsup is decent up/down monitoring.

I've recently been hunting for something that can monitor the vSwitch, with no luck.

 

-----signature-----

Ahhh.. Cacti was one that I used to monitor our license server back in the day. It was pretty good for that. I could log onto the server and see who was using a certain license and call them up to tell them to get off of it.

 

-----signature-----

The problem with Cacti was getting it to work, once you had it working... it was beautiful, we used it for monitoring switches, etc. Didn't know you could watch licenses too.. damn. Oh well, we dont' have it anymore

 

-----signature-----