I am sure there is such software, I am just failing to google it.
I am looking for a service or application that will email and or SMS notify of a machine dropping offline. We are looking into rolling out a thin client package to some of the businesses that we think could benefit from it. My concern is I want something that we can load onto a server or mission critical workstation that can be monitored remotely like via a virtual network connection. If the connection drops to the server at XYZ insurance an app on one of my machines in the office generates an email and or SMS notification that there may be a problem at XYZ insurance and to contact them and inquire if power is out, etc.
Obviously a machine that is down cannot send such a notification and since I am looking at thin clients, they will go down with the server.
works pretty damn slick if someone needed an extra basic workstation for browsing, email, etc. I loaded the server software on my desktop machine at the shop (a 2.0 ghz dual-core with 4gb ram. I was playing world of warcraft on my desktop with a thin client merrily browsing and working just fine. Very easy to setup.
First, you need to define exactly what you’ll be monitoring - a simple web server response, or performing some sort of database lookup, or…?
The “swiss army knife” solution is Nagios. If it can’t monitor whatever needs monitoring by itself, somebody has already written a Nagios plugin that adds the function. Of course, this means you need a system capable of running Nagios somewhere, plus the interesting meta-question of how to monitor the monitoring system to make sure it is up.
I set up Nagios for my company, and it’s quite versatile. We’ve added a lot of custom-written plugins to monitor specific aspects of our servers as well, and the plugins are very easy to write. The nagios configuration is very complicated, though, and requires learning a lot just to set up anything simple.
By the way, we considered the problem of the monitoring machine going down and being unable to send alerts, so we simply have two Nagios machines. The second one only has one check: make sure the first one is up and performing checks. They’re in different cities on different network connections.
Nagios doesn’t require much of the machine it runs on, so you could, for example, install a linux server distribution in a VM and install Nagios on that.
in ways what I want could be achieved by installing hamachi and just being able to see what machine show as online. I would just like some kind of email notification or a sound effect, something so we don’t have to stare at a screen all day to know that xyz insurance just dropped offline, not worried so much about specific application response just is it responding to a ping for example.
Will look into nagios. Would prefer a windows based solution if only because I am more comfortable in the environment.
Nagios for linux. ServersAlive or WhatsUpGold for cheap Windows solutions.
Ive used ServersAlive at a job once. Its pretty simple. The built-in features are pretty basic - ping, telnet, dns, smtp, etc. I wrote scripts that returned exit values that it could read to throw alarms. With a little programing, it can do quite a bit.
