Server Monitoring
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Not to hijack this thread, but what does everyone use locally for monitoring servers, switches, access points, etc? I see Zabbix mentioned a lot, but was looking for something that runs on Windows. Anyone use anything from SpiceWorks? Any good?
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@philmcdonnell said in Server Monitoring:
Not to hijack this thread, but what does everyone use locally for monitoring servers, switches, access points, etc? I see Zabbix mentioned a lot, but was looking for something that runs on Windows. Anyone use anything from SpiceWorks? Any good?
We used that heavily at my last job, and the Spiceworks App was alright, but it was a big time resource hog when scanning.
I'm not aware of any good / free utilities for Windows. Our Networking guys use WhatsUp Gold here, and I know Solar Winds has some products.
Edit: Even if you're not Comfortable with Linux, I'd still recommend Zabbix. There's a couple of Guides here on ML. I'll go find the links.
Edit 2: Here's a guide for Zabbix 3.x on CentOS 7. It's a bit out of date, but should give you an idea of what it would take to get the server bits installed.
https://mangolassi.it/topic/10373/install-zabbix-on-centos-7 -
@dafyre Thank you for your insight! I am leaning towards Zabbix, just didn't want to launch a separate machine just for that. But I am sure I will find other uses for the machine
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How is Zabbix on resources? What do you recommend for resources? (vCPU, RAM, etc.)
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@Curtis said in Server Monitoring:
How is Zabbix on resources? What do you recommend for resources? (vCPU, RAM, etc.)
It depends, really.... For 60 Switches, 110 APs, and ~35 Servers, I would set that up with 4GB of ram and 2 vCPU. I'd do a minimum of 64GB of storage. You can fiddle with the house keeping (in the Zabbix Web Interface) to control how long data is kept to speed up the web interface and database.
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@philmcdonnell said in Server Monitoring:
Not to hijack this thread, but what does everyone use locally for monitoring servers, switches, access points, etc? I see Zabbix mentioned a lot, but was looking for something that runs on Windows. Anyone use anything from SpiceWorks? Any good?
SW stopped releasing their software in 2014. It was always more for desktop style monitoring rather than servers. But they moved away from that software model long ago. You can still download it, but it's not maintained and last I knew didn't run on the last few versions of Windows (that might have been fixed, though.)
Generally monitoring from Windows isn't done because that's costly (consumes a Windows Server license) and bad for utilization (Windows uses a lot more resources than a Linux solution.) So it's not popular with solid tools.
Zabbix would definitely be the "go to" solution for what you describe, that is exactly what Zabbix is designed for.
I think Solarwinds runs on Windows, but I'd never touch them. Bad vendor that I would not trust on my network.
PRTG runs on Windows and is very popular. @romo literally deployed this on Windows this morning, so I know that it works.
ManageEngine OpManager might run on Windows, not sure.
I think the big choice would be Nagios which now runs on Windows.
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@philmcdonnell said in Server Monitoring:
@dafyre Thank you for your insight! I am leaning towards Zabbix, just didn't want to launch a separate machine just for that. But I am sure I will find other uses for the machine
No need for a separate machine, just a separate VM. And you'd want a separate VM no matter what monitoring tool you go with.
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@dafyre said in Server Monitoring:
Edit: Even if you're not Comfortable with Linux, I'd still recommend Zabbix. There's a couple of Guides here on ML. I'll go find the links.
Or Zenoss.
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@scottalanmiller said in Server Monitoring:
@dafyre said in Server Monitoring:
Edit: Even if you're not Comfortable with Linux, I'd still recommend Zabbix. There's a couple of Guides here on ML. I'll go find the links.
Or Zenoss.
I've tried several and encourage folks to try them too. I just find myself always coming back to Zabbix.
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@scottalanmiller said in Server Monitoring:
@philmcdonnell said in Server Monitoring:
@dafyre Thank you for your insight! I am leaning towards Zabbix, just didn't want to launch a separate machine just for that. But I am sure I will find other uses for the machine
No need for a separate machine, just a separate VM. And you'd want a separate VM no matter what monitoring tool you go with.
I have a very small lan at a non-profit I am doing IT volunteer work for. They have very little if any budget so looking for the best free stuff if possible. When you say run everything in a VM, what are you using as a host? Is the host Windows or Linux and what would be the controller? I have used VirtualBox on Windows before, never done it on Linux. Not much experience with Linux except for web servers that run CentOS and cPanel or DirectAdmin control panels.
Thanks for all your help everyone!
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@philmcdonnell PRTG
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@philmcdonnell said in Server Monitoring:
I have a very small lan at a non-profit I am doing IT volunteer work for. They have very little if any budget so looking for the best free stuff if possible. When you say run everything in a VM, what are you using as a host?
Whatever the Windows VMs are on. Hyper-V, KVM, Xen... whatever free tool you are using. Vmware would work, but obviously that requires money and has no place in a non-profit. So I'm assuming no Vmware.
But your Linux VM can run anywhere a Windows VM can, but better.
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@philmcdonnell veeam recently released veeam one community edition.
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@philmcdonnell said in Server Monitoring:
Not much experience with Linux except for web servers that run CentOS and cPanel or DirectAdmin control panels.
Thanks for all your help everyone!None of the platform stuff is affected by it being Linux. Linux is only what you install in the VM. All of your servers, especially in a non-profit as they have less buffer, should be virtualized already (anything since 2005 or so.) So in theory, they should be all set with whatever that is. Hyper-V is the most common and expected here. Personally I'd prefer KVM. but anything works.
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@murpheous said in Server Monitoring:
@philmcdonnell veeam recently released veeam one community edition.
That's been around for years, but boy does it do a lot more now than it used to.
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@philmcdonnell said in Server Monitoring:
@scottalanmiller said in Server Monitoring:
@philmcdonnell said in Server Monitoring:
@dafyre Thank you for your insight! I am leaning towards Zabbix, just didn't want to launch a separate machine just for that. But I am sure I will find other uses for the machine
No need for a separate machine, just a separate VM. And you'd want a separate VM no matter what monitoring tool you go with.
I have a very small lan at a non-profit I am doing IT volunteer work for. They have very little if any budget so looking for the best free stuff if possible. When you say run everything in a VM, what are you using as a host? Is the host Windows or Linux and what would be the controller? I have used VirtualBox on Windows before, never done it on Linux. Not much experience with Linux except for web servers that run CentOS and cPanel or DirectAdmin control panels.
Thanks for all your help everyone!
I've currently got a Zabbix instance running in VirtualBox on my Laptop
It works fine. -
@philmcdonnell said in Server Monitoring:
@scottalanmiller said in Server Monitoring:
@philmcdonnell said in Server Monitoring:
@dafyre Thank you for your insight! I am leaning towards Zabbix, just didn't want to launch a separate machine just for that. But I am sure I will find other uses for the machine
No need for a separate machine, just a separate VM. And you'd want a separate VM no matter what monitoring tool you go with.
I have a very small lan at a non-profit I am doing IT volunteer work for. They have very little if any budget so looking for the best free stuff if possible. When you say run everything in a VM, what are you using as a host? Is the host Windows or Linux and what would be the controller? I have used VirtualBox on Windows before, never done it on Linux. Not much experience with Linux except for web servers that run CentOS and cPanel or DirectAdmin control panels.
Thanks for all your help everyone!
You can maybe try https://www.lansweeper.com/ as well, for under 100 devices its free. I have personally not used it but have seen it appear in lots of searches.
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@dafyre Thanks, going to test it that way first I guess. Then figure out a VM to use for production.
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Timely topic for me. I've been using SpiceWorks help desk for many years to monitor my network/workstations/servers and to track my issues. No one here uses it to OPEN TICKETS and as Scott mentioned earlier, I believe the desktop version of the Help Desk is dead. I looked at going to the cloud version but I didn't want to have to load an agent on all devices.
We are firmly into Office 365 (E1 and E3) and I've considered using Microsoft To-Do/Planner (and Maybe a SharePoint Teams List) for my day to day stuff and to also look up historical records. But I don't want to lose my sever/workstation/network scanner as it has provided good info when I needed it. So, I'm looking for something to scan my entire network, similar to SpiceWorks help desk and just keep my to-do list separate.
