Network Monitoring

[MatthewL]

Those of you with larger networks with services hosted externally do any of you monitor services externally so your alerted when there is possibly an issue so you can expect calls from users?

 

We use PRTG and have a number of things we access remotely to us but at the minute we only monitor our side of things and even then we had an instance the other week when we lost internet connectivity but the external connection was still up so need to look at ways and change what we monitor so we know things are down as such.

 

Things like DNS servers, Office 365 mail and Teams, is there a good way to do this within software like PRTG?

[Norphy]

With PRTG at least, you could write your own sensors to extract information from an XML or JSON file. You could use a PowerShell or Bash script to generate this information. I'm doing this to monitor CPU usage and monetary costs on some Azure VMs at the moment.

[Bedders]

I use https://uptimerobot.com/ for our small company, but all I check are SMTP, and HTTPS on our mail server. We have our Exchange server on-premises and if the Outlook Web App goes down unexpectedly, I know the internet to our office has broken. I monitor SMTP separately just in case there's a misconfiguration anywhere that results in our MX record breaking without me knowing about it.

[MatthewL]

With PRTG at least, you could write your own sensors to extract information from an XML or JSON file. You could use a PowerShell or Bash script to generate this information. I'm doing this to monitor CPU usage and monetary costs on some Azure VMs at the moment.

 

Will look at the PS route.

[Deanuk]

Solarwinds.

[MatthewL]

We are a PRTG house and not looking to move from that at present just expand what we are monitoring and more in depth.

[ITGURU]

I'd been using the free 100 sensor prtg network monitor for years. Due to some funding, i've now just purchased a 1000 sensor license to cover everything i need to monitor the core services. great product and seems to be the best for exchange server monitoring as other products I tested dont include all the probes with useful information, like prtg.

[sluggster66]

Entuity really interesting product. Using across 7sites Edited September 15, 2020 by sluggster66
Miss spell

[jthompson]

Only really have experience of Check_MK but it has a number of different check types that might be useful. You can monitor DNS services, testing for expected results. You can also monitor HTTP/S services, testing for certain strings or regexs in the response. If there's a public status page for whatever cloud service you're using (e.g. https://www.google.com/appsstatus) I guess you could try to pick out a word or phrase to use as the basis of an alarm for when something goes wonky.

[dhicks]

Things like DNS servers, Office 365 mail and Teams, is there a good way to do this within software like PRTG?

 

We use DNSMadeEasy to monitor our on-site hosted services (our remote access server, mainly). We also use IFTTT to alert us about server cupboard temperature, which came in handy last week after a power cut (everything but the aircon unit was on UPS...).

[SirStewartWallace]

We use Zabbix for monitoring internally plus external connectivity, and also pull into it from Google, Zoom, etc public status page updates.

[sparkeh]

Solarwinds, luckily we are way behind on patching...

[Jcx500]

We Use Zabbix on a Ubuntu Box, We Use the free version of PRTG as a backup monitoring as we've had some issues with zabbix

[mdrabble]

Use LibreNMS, works well but relies on being able to PING the device to monitor - which isnt ideal as I wanted to turn off that feature on our smoothwall box.

 

Tried to use PTRG and Zabbix and got lost trying to configure them.

[robyholmes]

Raspberry Pi 4 running Nems Linux which is a pre-configured nagios install.

 

Just be careful with the pre-configured i ternet speed test, it uses a lot of bandwidth by testing too frequently.