

Ask HN: How do you monitor several servers? - drakmail

I&#x27;m notice that when I have more than 5 servers need to monitor, I&#x27;m periodically forgetting about updating each of them and checking them resources usage.<p>Seems that Canonical&#x27;s landscape is pretty good for that, but canonical&#x27;s support said that payment plans starts from 100 servers =&#x2F;<p>If you have 5+ servers – does you use anything to monitor and update all of them? If use – what is it?
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dmoreno
Currently I just use pingdom to check availability, but I'm really interested
on other people needs, so I'm more interested on a related set of questions:

What would your ideal monitoring system have? Would it be web based? terminal
based? Zero install effort or full customizability? What would you like to
monitor? Just monitoring? Alerting too? Just servers or also containers?

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rezand
Last night I grabbed a JavaScript text to speech script
[http://responsivevoice.org/](http://responsivevoice.org/) and tossed it into
my laptops Apache public directory and wrote a few lines for Ajax request to a
script I tossed on each server that would just return some status info stuff
like

exec('uptime',$response); echo $response;

In around 15 minutes I now have a siri like bot to take with me that will
alert me to anything funky which is necessary after a week of some rogue
processes.

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andrew-lucker
Nagios is pretty standard for monitoring.

Administration is usually custom automation. There are a lot of tools for
this, and they all have good and bad, so you should just go with what is most
accessible to you.

~~~
drakmail
Yes, I know about Nagios, Zabbix, Munin, etc. But all of them like star ships
control panel – has too many options for my needs.

Maybe, it is good way to use one of them, but it so hard to find day for
configuration of all of this =)

~~~
emilburzo
Give munin another chance, I find it's the easiest to setup from the list.

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jpetersonmn
We use several things including custom scripts to monitor and alert when
needed. However our main tool is ipMonitor. We monitor hundreds of servers in
multiple environments (dev, test, prod) and the thing that I don't like is all
the noise that gets created. It makes it hard to find the real important
issues. I believe monitoring is great, but any alert should have an actionable
items to perform.

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GamblersFallacy
I just use terminator terminal, multi-terminal grid. One terminal per server
showing htop via ssh.

[http://gnometerminator.blogspot.com.au/p/introduction.html](http://gnometerminator.blogspot.com.au/p/introduction.html)

[http://hisham.hm/htop/](http://hisham.hm/htop/)

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drakmail
[http://cloudstats.me/server-monitoring/](http://cloudstats.me/server-
monitoring/) almost ideal, but has several pitfalls: closed source, $5 for
server, and doesn't have package manager monitoring.

~~~
aquanetworks
heya, thanks for your note, the agent is actually open source. in re package
manager, do speak to us in skype, we are pretty open for anything ;)

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hakanderyal
[http://scoutapp.com](http://scoutapp.com)

Dead simple to install and use. Fancy graphs, lots of useful plugins for
monitoring processes.

Using it for more than a year, no problems, responsive support.
$15/server/month.

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MalcolmDiggs
If you're hosted on AWS by chance, check out their "CloudWatch" services.
Monitors everything I usually need, sends alerts as-needed, etc.

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ice303
Nagios core.

