Once systems are up and running, they need to be monitored. Some people will say, why not buy HP Openview, well, there may be value in HP Openview, but for most small to medium sized businesses there are other tools that get the job done.
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SNIPS
- http://www.navya.com/software/snips/
- Cost: Free SNIPS is a combine SystemSurviellance and StatsTrending system. It has major flaws such as a complex configuration, but it is an all-in-one system that works once it is up and running, and you don't make too many changes. One of the interesting things about snips is the fact that it does not need SNMP for monitoing unix systems and collects a bunch of information that is useful to system admins such as disk space, IObandwidth etc.
Oh, did I mention it was free? There is a commercial product from this same company that looks interesting, but I have never used it. It is call NOCOL, if you are an experienced admin and have installed and used this tool, please let me know. Some screen shots can be found here:
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MRTG
- http://www.navya.com/software/snips/
- Cost: Free MRTG (Multi Router Traffic Grapher) is a nice tool to track StatsTrending over time. The output is similar to SNIPS, but can graph alot more types of data but will require more work upfront. This tool can and has tracked every kind of device.
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HP Openview
- http://www.openview.hp.com/
- Cost: Expensive, requires special skills for configuration and maint. There are lots of reviews out there for this product. If you are running a multination network, put it on your list for consideration.
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SNMPc
- http://www.castlerock.com/
- Cost: Shareware, ~$3k Canadian for licencing Straigt forward monitoring tool, too bad it runs on Windows. Maybe if they port it to a real enterprise OS, I would like it more.