[Techtalk] Server monitoring and trends

[Gayathri Swaminathan]

On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 4:12 AM, Magni Onsoien <
magnio+lc-techtalk at pvv.ntnu.no <magnio%2Blc-techtalk at pvv.ntnu.no>> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I have fallen off the bandwagon of useful tools over the past years, so
> I must admit I have no clues whatsoever about whichs tools I should
> choose for monitoring and to see trends in resource usage (statistics)
> for my servers. 8 years ago I would have chosen Bigbrother for the
> monitoring part and something else I can't remember the name of for
> trends. But what about in 2010?
>
> Short overview of our needs for monitoring software:
> * 30ish servers at 4 sites.  The state of each server as well as each
> site should be available. The state of a site is the sum of all
> services, not necessarily the sum of servers. Each server may run
> several services, and it may take several servers to run one service -
> even several services for another service.
>
> * The previous requirement may be complicated, so as a minimum we need
> to monitor each physical server and see the state of a site as the sum
> of all servers.
>
> * All servers are running Ubuntu Server 8.04 LTS, and while we build
> everything ourself, we try to base our packages on standard Ubuntu
> src-debs.
>
>
Hello Magni:

After a good time of research of open tools available for monitoring we
narrowed list down to:

- ZenOSS - this looked very promising as it has capability to provide one
stop dashboard
- Cacti - RRD based and very extensible/ adaptable
- Icinga (Nagios fork)

All of them trend, store statistics in mysql, postgresql for latter use. We
ended using Icinga in our operations as most of us were comfortable with
Nagios already.

We reviewed Splunk but ran out of the free*-ness soon as we had tons of
servers to monitor. It worked right off the box though, if you can purchase
it and did not take long to configure/ get going.

For specific detailed monitoring (tuning metrics, IO, memory, network) we
still use good old MRTG.


-- 
Gayathri Swaminathan
gpgkey: 3EFB3D39
Volunteer, FDP