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Just purchased some VPS hosting and am getting setup to get my startup app underway. For the moment I'm playing sysadmin and am running into errors galore whilst trying to work out the kinks.

So I was wondering what the best solution (if any?) there is to receiving notice of mission critical errors whilst away from my desk? ie. sleeping.

HopelessN00b
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Set up a Pingdom monitoring service to send you emails and SMS messages when things go wrong. Also set up something like Nagios to alert on internal services, also set up to alert via sms, using a provider such as Clickatell.

Tom O'Connor
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  • Thank you very much for those links, they seem to be just what I am after. –  Feb 14 '10 at 22:40
  • They're good services, they're what I've used in the past. Currently I use a combination of Nagios and Munin, Pingdom and Clickatell. Also using Zabbix for part of my Dayjob. It's a bit like nagios and munin all rolled into one, written in PHP, worth a mention too. Zenoss is supposed to be good if you like Java. – Tom O'Connor Feb 15 '10 at 00:22
  • Zenoss is quite good (I've used it at a previous job). It is a rather comprehensive solution, but still reasonably quick to set up. It's more geared to monitoring *many* systems, so might be overkill for a single server. Ah, and it has nothing to do with Java (it's written in Python). – sleske Feb 15 '10 at 21:17
  • Oh, i thought it was a Java webapp.. I was thinking of OpenNMS. – Tom O'Connor Feb 15 '10 at 22:36
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You want some type of system or Network monitoring

Just browse through the serverfault questions tagged "monitoring". Once you have the "big picture", you can ask a more specific question.

sleske
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If you're still looking, you might want to check out a service I'm working on called PagerDuty. It collects email from monitoring systems (like Nagios, Monit, Pingdom, and so on), and forwards them to you using any combination of phone calls, SMS messages, or emails.

It's got a bunch of other features that you might find useful, like automatic repeats of alerts and escalation of unanswered alerts to other engineers. We also let you set up on-call schedules, so you can send alerts to one engineer for one week, and a different engineer the next.

Check it out and let me know what you think. I'm always looking for new features to add.

Andrew Miklas
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