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I am looking for reviews and suggestions a an online service such as http://www.alertmefirst.com/

I need a service or system that can monitor the following and provide me daily emails and monthly reports on the status of the following:

  • is internet into the company working
  • is email working, send and recieve.
  • is iis website working
  • is DNS corretly functioning
  • is the terminal services gateway working
  • which sites are replicating and which not (ms sql replication).

It would be ncie to have the option of SMS alerts but not needed.

If you have any other option or sugestions i would be greatful.

regards

ian

Zypher
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SetiSeeker
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  • Thansk for the feedback. We use a MS enviroment hosted by ourselves. I am specfically looking for external tools to monitor everything. – SetiSeeker Jan 04 '10 at 12:45

4 Answers4

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We use Zabbix for monitoring all our servers and remote branches. You can get notifications in many ways, including SMS/Jabber/email. Using a GSM modem is a very great addon to this setup.

Maxwell
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have a look at http://www.r-u-on.com. I have found it really useful. It should let you monitor the status of all you listened using the porper agents (not sure about the sql replication, though).

It's free up to 20 servers and straightforward to use. You can monitor through web, desktop widgets, rss, email or SMS.

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I can't tell from your question what kind of environment you're talking about, in-house or hosted, but rather than using some third party to me this is screaming out for Nagios. I monitor all those functions and a whole lot more, except for the SQL replication (only because it doesn't apply). I currently don't have SMS alerts going because I'm still trying to get gnokii working but in the past I did so using sms-tools and a GSM modem.

John Gardeniers
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  • Ugh, dump gnokii and the mobile and just buy a GSM modem. They don't cost much and save you more than their purchase price in time you don't have to spend faffing around. – womble Jan 04 '10 at 10:25
  • Tight-wad small company struggling to stay viable but if you know of a cheapish unit in Oz I'm interested. I don't know if foreign ones work with our network and SIM cards or not. All I know is every phone I've had (all 3) has been an Oz specific model. – John Gardeniers Jan 04 '10 at 11:36
  • Most providers have e-mail to SMS gateways, which is what I use for my Nagios notifications. – Keith Stokes Jan 04 '10 at 12:42
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    e-mail to SMS gateway works if your e-mail works. What if you want to alert on broken outgoing mail? As for a cheap modem, we use this, works well: http://www.chinavasion.com/product_info.php/pName/gprs-modem-dongle/ – Max Alginin Jan 04 '10 at 13:22
  • That's my main reason for wanting SMS locally - it doesn't rely on landlines. – John Gardeniers Jan 04 '10 at 21:59
  • Of course, relying on something running internally for your monitoring is risky in itself (disclaimer: my company does external monitoring) Your email going down is only one possible problem - what if your entire site loses power? In that case it doesn't matter what you're using to send out alerts, you won't get notified unless you've got something watching from the outside. – Jason Abate Aug 23 '12 at 22:38
  • @Jason, the alerts will go out long before the UPS batteries get flat (just ensure you also set up alerting for when the UPS goes to battery). Internal SMS means there is NO reliance on anything external. – John Gardeniers Aug 24 '12 at 00:14
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Look at http://www.pingdom.com - they have the ability to pull an XML file from your site with specific parameters - just write some scripts that would check whatever you need to monitor and return XML, then plug them into an externally accessible site and point Pingdom at it.

Max Alginin
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