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Do you run a web site? Manage a rack
of database servers? Look after a college network? Monitoring the
machines and services you are responsible for is a sensible move.
You can know about problems the instant they occur, and be fixing
them before the first user complains. There is also a whole raft of
software out there to help achieve this, so I thought I would take
a little look at what is available. |
Ping Utilities
Ping utilties are probably the simplest type of monitoring available.
A ping (often also called an 'echo' simply lets you know a machine is
online and responding to network requests. This won't tell you anything
about the state of the services on the machine, but at least you will
know it isn't switched off!
Firstly is our very own Keep-Alive program, available on the software
page. This will let you ping one or more machines on a regular basis,
and gives a quick at-a-glance view of their status. Being simple, these
types of software are normally free, and more are available at FreewareFiles.com
Server Monitoring Utilites
Next up are server monitoring utilities. There is quite a wide range of
systems here, from the simple and free up to applications costing lots
of money. These will offer more facilities than simple ping tests, and
will be able to connect to machines in a variety of ways to more accurately
monitor what is required. In addition, the alerting options will often
be more substantial.
We offer Keep-Alive 2 as a low-cost solution. This is able to perform
pings, but can also monitor web sites, database servers, mail servers,
Windows services and more. Alerting options include mail and SMS Text
messaging. Visit www.keep-alive.co.uk
for more details.
There are of course many other options available. GFI, for instance, offer
a good featured server monitoring suite that will monitor a comprehensive
range of services and applications. Prices start at under $400 for 5 IP
Addresses. At a lower cost, ServersAlive offers a similar range of monitoring
options to our own Keep-Alive 2 system, and receives praise from its users.
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Paid System Monitoring
What if you would rather let someone else deal with the monitoring
so you only deal with the problems? There are plenty of services that
will do this, although the cost goes up accordingly. Watchmouse, for
instance, offer services starting at £20 per month to monitor
a single website with alerts via eMail, SMS or ICQ. If you need more
machines monitoring, or more frequently, you can obviously pay more
for an enhanced service. These type of services are more commonly
used for web site monitoring rather than server monitoring, because
your own database servers and so on will usually be hidden behind
a firewall or two. |
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