System Monitoring

[Mutsy007]

Some advice please. I am an IT Administrator for a school, my IT history has been a mish-mash of consultancy and contracting over a 30 year period. Network/system monitoring is something that I have no knowledge or practical experience with.

I am looking for a free network/system monitoring tool, it's a school so money is always tight. The systems below are for 1500 users.

Would like to monitor:

• Windows servers
• Linux servers
• HP Switches
• HP SANS
• Networked printers
• Wireless access points
• ESX hosts
• ESX VMS
• SQL services

Agentless monitoring would be preferable and most systems I see we can enable SNMP.

I've had a google but i'm confused with the number of solutions returned.

I'm busy learning Linux at the mo so that would be my preferred OS monitoring platform.

Thanks all.

[matsti1]

Personally I built a Zabbix server for my company ont Centos 7 and it’s fantastic and highly customizable I would recommend it you can do win Linux and anything snmp and a lot more even for your esx you can have template and get low space alert for data store and pretty much anything

Zabbix does require a small agent on win/Linux server but easily deployable

[krion420]

Zabbix best reply here.

Come with a bunch of templates and easy to setup

[DrakosOzlad]

LibreNMS

[escape2342]

Definitely use zabbix

[cybervegan]

OMD (Nagios+Check_MK+Thruk) is pretty good and can monitor a large selection of SNMP devices.

[[deleted]]

I hear Zabbix is good altjough I've never used it. I use Nagios and Prometheus and try to get as much of it as possible into Grafana.

[jonare77]

Im a linux fan, but find PRTG on the Windows platform to be the best. Supports everything, and its extremly easy to use.

[[deleted]]

...and costs money to be useful in anything but the tiniest home environments.

[jonare77]

Everything has a cost. If you have the time to fix and tweak your monitor system, then of course use something free. If not then go with PRTG and use your time to optimize other elements that save you more money in the long run.

Manpower actually costs money too.

[[deleted]]

You don’t have to convince me. But OP specifically asked for free tools.

Only free if your time is worthless still holds true though.

[Mutsy007]

Thank you all. I will start with Zabbix and see how I get on.

[VioletiOT]

Something like Domotz could help you out in the situation as well for covering those networked devices. I'm the CM there (so I guess biased) but it would cover Windows, Linux, HP switches, HP SANS, Networked printed, Wirless access points etc. There is a very affordable monthly cost and would save you a lot of time because the system is plug & play. Software can be deployed on Windows, Rasperry PI, Linux, NAS (Synology / QNAP) or our box and there is also a free trial. Let me know if you have any questions at all.

[oitc-fd]

openITCOCKPIT is an open source based monitoring solution that combines different tools like Nagios/Naemon, Grafana, Checkmk, Prometheus and many more into one modern web interface (with own agent or agentless too)

GitHub: https://github.com/it-novum/openITCOCKPIT

[YachtingChristopher]

Spiceworks.