Free monitoring application ?
can someone recommend me a easy and free application that will allow me to monitor multiple servers ?
Responses
Guru
9715 points
Hi Edward,
You can install the package htop - that is a great free monitoring tool, it's available in the EPEL repository.
Execute : sudo yum install htop ... I already gave you the instructions how to add the repo earlier today.
Regards,
Christian
Community Member
67 points
i want to monitor multiple servers across the network not only the main server
Guru
9715 points
Hi Edward,
Oh, I obviously must have missed this point. Well, then Cockpit would be a suitable choice.
Install Cockpit on all server systems and add those in Cockpit on the main server system.
Cockpit is included in the RHEL extras repository, so first enable the repo, execute :sudo subscription-manager repos --enable rhel-7-server-extras-rpms
Install it by executing : sudo yum install cockpit Additional plugins are available.
Check it by executing : sudo yum list cockpit* and install those plugins you want.
Afterwards enable the service : sudo systemctl enable --now cockpit.socket
Add a firewall rule : sudo firewall-cmd --add-service=cockpit --permanent
Regards,
Christian
"Monitoring" is a broader term and using open-source tools in Linux/Unix would most of the time depends on ones specific needs, easy of use, and also need to look at the human resources available and skilled enough to manage such tools. At enterprise level, one would certainly go for a well build, supported, scalable, heterogeneous, robust monitoring solutions, and there many paid solutions, however, if we look at the open-source side then we get to see nagios, cacti, ganlia,Icinga, Pandora FMS etc,. the list continues, hence, you may have to select the best which fist and serves your purpose.
Yes, as mentioned by Christian, you may use "cockpit" as well. At times, I'd preferred native Linux monitoring commands such as top, vmstat, netstat, iostat, sar, mpstat, dstat, tcpdump, iperf, and some advanced tools such as valgrind etc,. to get the task done. All these are well documented by "Brendan Greg" here http://www.brendangregg.com/linuxperf.html. Nmon is another great one http://nmon.sourceforge.net/pmwiki.php
Also, at times we may prefer to write down our own scripts just get the things done as we expected which sounds more a perfect fit. There is "xsos" written by Ryan which could be another good option when we just need to monitor some stacks and doesn't need a heavy tool https://access.redhat.com/discussions/469323. Even I had written a simple script to get system stats (mostly hardware based) by using native Linux commands to support my client, later I had altered this and published in my blog http://simplylinuxfaq.blogspot.in/p/how-to-find-hardware-details-in-linux.html, it may help someone, again these are not just the only options, there are a lot in this Unix open-source world.
All the best!!!
Are you looking to just monitor Linux nodes or do you need to monitor other OS and devices also?
Some will point at nagios, others will point at Zabbix, but really many solutions. Personally, I use Xymon as itis very easy to get going from scratch, has a vibrant community, is really easy to learn/extend and can monitor all manner of *nix as well as Windows and devices like Cisco switches/routers. Xymon RHEL/Centos packages can be found http://terabithia.org/rpms/xymon/
We've been using Nagios and NRPE for years. I wouldn't call it simple but as others have said it depends on how much monitoring you want to do. You can find many plugins for Nagios to do full monitoring of various other things such as your databases and your network devices. You can get NSCP+ (NetSaint Client Plus) to monitor your MS Windows systems. Also you can write scripts that work with Nagios to do specific tests (e.g. checking web pages for specific content).
We had a guy come here that was going to "improve" things by running Zabbix but he never finished implementation. I don't know if that was because of Zabbix or because of him. I've never looked at Zabbix myself as I've not felt the need given how well Nagios works.
Guru
9715 points
Hi Jeffrey,
As Edward is asking for a free solution, I want to add that only Nagios Core is a free product ... when you want to use other Nagios Products you need to buy a licence.
Regards,
Christian
Guru
10133 points
Joining this discussion nearly a year later. We're looking to try zabbix, I'll post how it goes. What led us to zabbix instead of Nagios, with Nagios, we noticed we apparently have to edit the config for each/every host (on the zabbix server) however, with zabbix, we can make one entry systemically on the server. That last statement might need some more clarity, but in principle, it was easier to configure zabbix instead of Nagios for many clients.
Welcome! Check out the Getting Started with Red Hat page for quick tours and guides for common tasks.