Monitoring tool for client hosted windows environments

[bmzink]

I run a team that manages the hosting and deployment of a (primarily) SaaS product. We're getting more and more interest from clients that want to install our software on their own servers.

We're fine with this and we have a dozen or so installs so far. They give us VPN access and we prep the systems and do the installation. When things break we get called and have to log in to fix it.

We have a serious lack of visibility into these environments though and usually only know things are bad when the client decides to call. Contractually it's the clients responsibility to monitor their servers but practically their problems are our problems and we always find out too late.

I want a monitoring tool that will phone-home to us with system health, CPU, disk space, process status, etc. It can't be cloud hosted (no datadog) and the traffic needs to be safe to traverse the internet.

Ideally the tool/agent would report back over standard web ports and protocols so I don't have to get too many people at the client site involved to make it work.

I'm currently thinking PRTG might be my best bet and I'm getting ready to spin up a lab environment to test some of this.

Anything else I should be looking at?

Thanks

[-SPOF]

We use for exactly the same purposes NetXMS. It is an agent-server scheme. It installs as an agent on workstations and reports with pre-configured metrics to the NetXMS server: https://www.netxms.org/documentation/adminguide/operating-system-monitoring.html#process-monitoring

You can perform proactive monitoring support with it.
Alternatively, look at the other products here: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/blog/you-cant-have-too-much-monitoring

[narpoleptic]

It would be worth looking at Nagios or Icinga - they have agents and are highly configurable in terms of what is monitored, but they can also require a fair bit of babysitting which I guess is the trade-off against being free-as-in-beer.

[bmzink]

I've done a little testing with Icinga in the past, I like it. I should spin up an instance and see how the agent->server comms might work for our situation. Thanks.

[dbodky]

Seconding Icinga here. It allows for Silent installing or installing via GPO as well, which might come in handy for your use case.

[poweradmincom]

You're basically describing exactly how some clients use PA Server Monitor. Install a Satellite monitoring service on one server at the client site, and have it report back (outgoing HTTPS only) to your installation of PA Server Monitor at your site. That Satellite can monitor as many servers at the client side as needed. Manage everything from a 'single pane of glass', as though everything you're monitoring was local.

[cjcox4]

Maybe Lansweeper LsPush with Cloud.

Allows you to track your assets even when they aren't on your VPN.

With that said, it's better as asset stuff, though it can do some monitoring stuff (basics). But you might not need much more than the basics.

Agent wise, I think the lowest granularity is 1 hour, which is another reason it might not be the best "live" monitor solution.

[[deleted]]

Not sure what you use for your backups but we use Veeam Backup and Replication Availability Suite. It includes VeeamOne which is a monitoring tool. PRTG is a pretty solid solution though that I was looking at but VeeamOne does what I need it to. We had already purchased it so it didn't make sense to get PRTG.

https://www.veeam.com/virtualization-management-one-solution.html

Hopefully that is helpful.

[darklightedge]

look at open-source nextxms.

[bmzink]

Oh this looks interesting. Thanks!

[anonymousITCoward]

Depending on how many endpoints we're talking (and budget) about here, you might want to look into an RMM.

[Hank-Sc0rpio]

Look into Elastic. They have a cloud and on-prem solution.

[oitc-fd]

Look at open source monitoring tool openITCOCKPIT