Nagios

Using RAID to improve availability is fine, but don’t forget to monitor it properly. Otherwise you will never know, that half of your mirror has already gone out of service for months.

If you are tired of scanning all kind of CERT advisories in your mailbox and you are running a nice Debian-based landscape using mostly package-based software, you should consider using check_apt from the Nagios plugins.

Without special reconfiguration on the SNMP daemon, you are able to check processes on a Linux resp. services on a Windows host remotely:

For the basic remote checks I evaluated several SNMP checks for Nagios and finally moved on with the following to begin with:

If you have a Zero Service running at some URL like http://zero.example.org/zero/, it’s quite simple to connect host objects in Nagios to the correct view of performance data.

Nagios provides two host attributes for this purpose: action_url, notes_url

SNMP (at least NET-SNMP in Linux) is providing enough data to setup checks for CPU, memory, disk and processes to a standard Nagios.