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I have a little experience with server monitoring products from my previous job (mainly Nagios), but never had the chance to set up a monitoring scheme from scratch. Every time there was a number of machines that needed to be monitored, running the Nagios Daemon (I think there is a fancy name for this, but it eludes my memory at this point), and a dedicated machine running Nagios.

Now that I am self-employed, most of the time, I find myself setting up a single server for my clients (storage, mail, WLAN controller, etc...).

Is there some kind of LIGHTWEIGHT monitoring solution that can be run on the same machine that it is supposed to be monitoring? I am well aware that Nagios (and the other commercial and open-source monitoring applications) are capable of doing this but I object on the grounds of -one- it being overkill (not to mention misuse of system resources) and -two- being bad practice doing so.

Please feel free to suggest any solution, and of course educate me in case I am being erroneous about something. Let it be noted that I am open to ideas that might require a degree of "hacking" on my part. I am not explicitly set on deploying a pre-built app, any solution will and can be considered.

EDIT: There is a single requirement for this. I need it to be able to respond in a custom way to events (assigning a script as a response to a trigger will do).

dlyk1988
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  • I think you're being erroneous about something. What happens if one of these machines dies and _can't_ send out a cry for help? Besides, many monitoring systems are multi-tenant capable, so you can give the client a username and password and they only see their own server. – Michael Hampton Sep 07 '13 at 00:33
  • @MichaelHampton Good points BUT... I am not talking about big corporate environments here, just SOHO/SME. These people just need to be able to monitor basic aspects of their machine's state. If it crashes completely, we know because there is no monitor at all. Also, I have no intention of maintaining a monitoring server myself for my clients (at least not right now). – dlyk1988 Sep 07 '13 at 00:39
  • @dsljanus Well, if you do that you could charge a little extra cash for that monitoring. ;) – Nathan C Sep 07 '13 at 01:09
  • @Zoredache On my question being put on hold, as being "off-topic": The given reason says that I have to "... describe...the specific problem...". I believe I adequately did that, describe the issue I am trying to solve, along with a summary of my research on the topic. Also, I am not asking for a product recommendation, but for a SOLUTION. I believe that in my question I have only stated what products I have tried so far and what my experience is. If a member of the community can provide a SOLUTION without any reference to specific PRODUCTS, I will be more than happy to upvote. – dlyk1988 Sep 08 '13 at 21:54

1 Answers1

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Monit is the easiest single-host solution out there. You'll have a web dashboard and CLI status interface, easy alerts, system status and the ability to add checks for specific daemons/processes. And it's very lightweight.

Take a look at the example configuration page.

ewwhite
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  • Is it able to run scripts? I just updated my question. – dlyk1988 Sep 07 '13 at 00:44
  • @dsljanus, you could have done a quick search through the [docs](http://mmonit.com/monit/documentation/monit.html). Yes, you can run arbitrary programs as a action. See the many examples like `if checkname then exec /myprocess` – Zoredache Sep 07 '13 at 08:38
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    @dsljanus Yes, it can run scripts. – ewwhite Sep 07 '13 at 09:05
  • @ewwhite I set up Monit on a space box I have at home. It works like a charm and is ridiculously lightweight. May be exactly what I was looking for. – dlyk1988 Sep 08 '13 at 22:16