Preferred Monitoring tools

[Mercutio]

Does anyone have any server monitoring tools they prefer to use over others?

In particular, one of my customers really wants something he can look at on his desktop to see what's going on with his three server systems. Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to like simple Performance monitor graphs.

 

[Handruin]

We use sysload at work for measuring performance of our VMs, but I've also heard of others using Nagios, but I have no experience with it. I tend to stick with the windows performance monitor and some other custom tools when using Linux. I spend 99% of my time in profiling Linux machines these days. Sysload works on either platform and has that client/server sort of approach that might meet the needs of your customer. He can run the agent on the three servers and then look at realtime or historical stats in a GUI.

 

[MaxBurn]

You mean real hardware monitoring like IPMI stuff? Once you have the right hardware there are lots of apps to gather info from that.

 

[Mercutio]

Actually, something like a desktop widget that shows CPU/RAM/Disk Queue length in some format that's prettier than Performance Monitor would probably be enough for my immediate need, though I'm sort of curious as to what people do on their own for professional work as well.

One of my customers has Solarwinds monitoring stuff set up and that's awesome, but overkill for their environment. That's the only commercial monitoring system I've dealt with.

 

[ddrueding]

As all my servers are VMs, I just have the vSphere client running on a workstation with the "performance" tab displaying some pretty graphs.

 

[Handruin]

As all my servers are VMs, I just have the vSphere client running on a workstation with the "performance" tab displaying some pretty graphs.

This only works if you're running the full vCenter because otherwise I don't think the historical data is retained. I suspect you might be seeing only the 20-minute real time data with the basic vSphere client?

 

[ddrueding]

I'm using the vSphere client to connect to a vCenter server, so it is all there.