So on my continuing quest for running a home lab/server/whatever, I'm trying to find something sane to monitor hosts and services. I feel like this is a potentially a huge topic and I've mostly found things like Nagios to monitor stuff. I've tried Naemon which uses Nagios core and Thruk for the GUI interface. Everything is being made more complicated by using nginx instead of apache, which Naemon/Thruk usually is configured with (in the guide and docs). My general feeling is there must be something better and oh my god so many layers of abstraction (this uses fastcgi, this uses php5-fpm, what is this uwsgi thing)....
My question: What do you use? Is Naemon/Thruk even worth it? I can see statuses and some history, but it's ugly and for graphing Naemon recommends (?) PNP4Nagios, which I haven't gotten to work yet.
I use Zabbix. It's free but reasonably easy to set up. I found it to be a lot more "plug and play" than something like Nagios, but without sacrificing a ton of flexibility. I run the server on a garbage Pentium 4 3.0GHz box and it runs fine. Rock solid, too, it once ran for 200 days without a restart, and that streak only ended because of a power failure.
I have installed and set it up at the last two places I have worked. Any plugins you can find that work with Nagios also work with it. I have even wrote a few of my own.
At my last job, I also managed some Cisco switches so I used centreon to monitor/graph traffic, memory, cpu, uptime, temperatures... etc on them. Was nice to have/collect that data from them.
Nice, thanks for the screenshots! I'll definitely try it out.
I've tried out Bosun, the monitoring thing the people of Stackoverflow made, and it was a much nicer experience than Naemon, though you have to set up a lot of more specific monitoring things yourself. The rule and alert system is very nice.
If you happen to be looking for a central place to collect syslogs form several machines, with the ability to create alerts based on error/warning messages... take a look at graylog. Its pretty awesome.
