Remote Site Monitoring

[Sylv3r]

We are currently looking at systems to enable us to monitor systems internally as we as remote servers.

 

We have signed up our primary schools to provide IT support to them and I really want some sort of system in which we can setup in our office to enable us to see an overview on a large screen or e-mail us when necessary alerts are hit to enable us to be proactive rather than reactive. We will have a dedicated roving technician, but if it's an issue that is flagged up, we may be able to resolve remotely.

 

Issues could be: Server goes offline, issue with low space etc. Ideally it's just endpoints we are looking to monitor and not workstations, other devices such as printers etc, but it would be nice if we could monitor such devices internally on our own network.

 

We've looked at Centrastage and a couple of other products via a google search but would like some suggestions as to what others are using. I have some budget available, but obviously something cost effective would be preferred anything free like Cacti or Nagios would also be good, although I am not sure how this would work on another site unto 10 miles away.

[FN-GM]

How will you be connected to these remote sites? Will they be all on one domain or something?

 

Thanks

[Ric_]

We use NagiosXI (you don't need to spend the cash like we do) to monitor 5 datacentres. Each site has its own local monitoring box so that we aren't as reliant on inter-site links. We also have email relays at each site.

 

Email is king for alerts but I also like to have a dashboard at each site giving overall health - this can be viewed on a web browser.

 

Something you probably want to watch is how things are polled - you don't want to be constantly polling over a WAN do independent systems or some form of proxy is important.

[Edsure]

we use centrastage, its great for proactive monitoring and remote assistance. you can also push software and run scripts through it

[Sagima]

We use nagios to monitor all of our severs and switches (and a few other things). IT Manager set it up on an old (now very old) Optiplex 745 about 3 years ago. It could be slightly more user friendly but we've not had any real issues with it.

We use it to monitor if services are running, disk space remaining, memory usage and it pings the servers to make sure they're awake. It just pings the switches to check they are still there.