I work in home automation and I’m looking for a way to check the status of devices on the networks of my clients houses. I have a windows machine at every site that we use for maintaining the software for each residence and I would like to install the NMS on that at each site. All it needs to be able to do is ping a few devices on each network an send me an email if something is offline for too long. I looked at spiceworks connectivity dashboard but it is not great for what I am trying to do. Ideally this is for me to be able to spot and correct issues before each client calls me, many of them use the residences as vacation spots or winter homes and If something goes offline or breaks during that period I usually don’t know unless I do a manual checkup or they call me with an issue. Most of the homes I manage are very large requiring multiple racks of equipment so automating the monitoring process would be fantastic.
Do you already have remote access to these? I’m guessing you manage them somehow. If yes, then it’s much easier than if not (I could also imagine you don’t manage these remotely for privacy reasons).
Either way, you could relatively easily have something like this ping_exporter scraped by Prometheus which will have a few alerting rules to notify you when things go wrong.
Maybe someone has a more out of the box solution.
I do have access to each machine though a corporate team viewer subscription. I looked into Prometheus a bit but was honestly hoping for just a simple self contained program/service for each machine. I’m not the most savvy with Linux and docker, Its something I would like to learn but if there is a off the shelf solution available I would like to try that first and see if it fits my needs. I will definitely do more research into your suggestion though.
There’s probably solutions that involve VPNs and/or tunnels as well - I’m thinking it’s probably not that big of a leap from teamviewer to teamviewer + one additional tcp connection for pingability monitoring.
The advantage of that approach would be that you could get away with just a ping_exporter running remotely on premise, and then a single Prometheus instance could monitor all your clients.
I’ve never tried this, but there should be a way to use the windows task scheduler to maintain a reverse ssh tunnel. (one port is all you need for ping_exporter).
I may have read through this too quickly but what about PRTG? We used that software at my old workplace and I loved it, emailed any time something went down for a specific period of time.
https://www.paessler.com/prtg/pricing
Pretty steep pricing. @WolfTech716 did you like the UI, how does it compare to Grafana for dashboards?
I worked with this about ten years ago, we used NagiOS back then. No idea if they are still around, but well worth checking out 
Budget?
zabbix works ok (but needs a *nix to run on), SolarWinds Orion NPM is what I use for work, but it is $$$
I’d consider Zabbix as it will give you a nice dashboard and can also give you other metrics via SNMP (Or Zabbix Agent) and is free.
I ran it back in the day and compared to Nagios it seemed a lot easier to set up, documentation IMHO seemed better, and I got the feeling that Nagios was all about pushing you into paid support.
That’s what I remember, reality may differ and things may have changed.
Sorry I took so long to reply to you. I can’t really comment on the pricing, but it is pretty steep when you link to it. After using it I loved it but I understand why that price may be too steep.