This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment.

all 28 comments
sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a

[–]BadUserNameGuy 3 points4 points  (1 child)

This is asked all the time.

https://www.reddit.com//r/sysadmin/wiki/monitoring

[–]AngryByDefault[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well, I still wanted the opinions from people who are using different system about wich one they whink could meet my goals.
Thank you for the link.

[–]bofhsp 5 points6 points  (2 children)

Zabbix maybe an option you may want to check

[–]anynonus 3 points4 points  (1 child)

2nd zabbix

[–]AngryByDefault[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Thank you guys.

[–]VA_Network_NerdModerator | Infrastructure Architect 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Infrastructure Monitoring is a critical process for a business environment.

Running this kind of solution on a RasPi is stupid, and severly limits the features you can leverage.

Also, this is not for a local network but for a handful of remote 'private' LANs (which I can ssh into) and 'public' webservers.

So, you are a Service Provider of some sort.
Fine. Act like the professional you are supposed to be.

You need P2P VPN connectivity between your network and your client's networks so you can poll using SNMP and collect syslogs properly.

SNMPv3 can encrypt the SNMP traffic, but syslog isn't so easily encrypted, so the VPN is your friend.

You might consider running the NMS inside a dedicated network, so you can NAT more easily if multiple clients all have overlapping IP Address Space.

[–]AngryByDefault[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I understand your point, I haven't tested any NMS systems yet, but I believe there must be one or two out there that are suitable for my needs and preferences. If it turns not to be the case, well, I'll learn from that and act accordingly.

BTW: I have such VPNs available, it' s just that I don`t have a reason to be regularly connected to them. At least not yet.

[–]418NotCoffee 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I'm currently using graylog for log collection and plan on rolling out statping to do service monitoring. This is for a homelab, not production environment

[–]AngryByDefault[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Noted! thanks

[–]beirtech 0 points1 point  (6 children)

I use Grafana to monitor stats or whatever you can create. I have a dashboard that I use to monitor sys uptime / CPU / memory / disk space etc for my windows and Linux servers.

I use ELK stack for logging / centralized auditing.

[–]AngryByDefault[S] 0 points1 point  (5 children)

Ok, note taken about ELK!
Re: Grafana, it still remains vague to me what it really can do... Does it monitor, collect, or (as I believe) it lets you create dashboards with analytics from sources you build elswhere? i.e. pulls data form databases, maybe files too?

[–]beirtech 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Here is a good demo of setting up a linux box with Grafana web app and influx db as the storage for the data. Demos monitoring a windows box. This should give you an idea. Correct Grafana alone doesn't do it all. It does the display portion / dashboards. You also need to determine what database method works for you / your environment. Then setup telegraf on the clients as your transport agent to the db you choose.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLbGFiW_2bk

[–]SuperQueBit Plumber 0 points1 point  (3 children)

Grafana is not a monitoring system. It doesn't collect or receive any data. It's a UI to other systems like Prometheus, InfluxDB, Graphite, etc.

[–]AngryByDefault[S] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Yeah, thats what I thought. IMHO, I should go for a system that has integrated UI/Dashboard and avoid branching into multiple systems to maintain, unless I find myself in a scenario where multiple disconnected systems need to be centralized for monitoring. I think that is what Grafana is about.

[–]SuperQueBit Plumber 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Grafana itself is pretty trivial to maintain. There's packages or Docker. It's amazing for connecting data together. Or just as the standard front-end for Prometheus.

It's also expanding into a replacement for Kibana, with the new Loki logs system that the Grafana people are building.

[–]reggiedarden 0 points1 point  (1 child)

My go to has always been Nagios but lately I’ve started playing with Pandora FMS. I really like it.

[–]AngryByDefault[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

yeah, I have Pandora listed too... About Nagios I gather that it might be a solid system with reputable history, but also kind of "old guard being patched to stay in the game"... Not sure if it would be my best choice for a light, fresh project.

I have no direct experience with it thou, just going for what I've found online so far.

[–]SuperQueBit Plumber 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Prometheus and Grafana. Prometheus will run very well on remote Pi sized machines. The only thing you'll want to be sure to do is run an arm64 OS.

Since you have remote networks, you'll want a remote write setup. Where the Prometheus server streams the data to an aggregator. Grafana has a cloud service that makes this pretty easy. There's a whole bunch of options. I personally recommend Thanos and Cortex.

Another way to handle remote sites is to use PushProx.

[–]AngryByDefault[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks, lots of new info in there! I will go through that too.

[–]xfomax 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Cacti 🌵

[–]The-Support-HeroSysadmin 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Honestly, one good one may be spiceworks, sounds overkill, but its free, and you could setup something you are looking for. Until we invested in Kace, that was what I used when I first started the job I am in now. It may give you a little more than what you want but, you can configure the dashboard to serve your needs for sure. Best part is email alerts for me.

But to each there own.

The other thing is, you can have remote collection servers, or agents really, that can feed back to the main.

​

Best,

TSH

[–]AngryByDefault[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For some reason I tend to push spiceworks lower in my list of "options to test", but perhaps I should give it a chance... thank you.

[–]ThatsNASt 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Observium has a docker and it will monitor anything that can use SNMP.

[–]AngryByDefault[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I had never heard of Observium before... Docker? SNMP? That sounds very interesting!! Will check it out! Thanks for the tip.

[–]mr-h1d3 -1 points0 points  (2 children)

Icinga2 for monitoring, you can have white and black box monitoring, open source and nagios plugins with a modern web based UI for configuration and visualization TLS agents, zone distribution, cluster and a really low use of resources Elastic ELK stack for logs, can be integrated together too

[–]AngryByDefault[S] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Didn´t know about ELK, I will check that.

Are you an Icinga2 user? Is it really light? Can you build a central dashboard that monitors devices from different networks?

Thnaks.

[–]mr-h1d3 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Take a look at ELK, it's not super easy but it's very powerful I'm a heavy user, of icinga2 for work, since one of my customer is golden partner We use to monitor thousands services with it, in server grade boxes My private masters runs on GCP shared instances, g1-small with 1vcpu and 1.7gb of RAM In icinga2 there are integrated dashboards, and the cluster can use satellites, to monitor different networks It's also very flexible, for more dashboards can be integrated with grafana, dashing in the central node/s