>>> sender: "Les Mikesell" date: "Fri, Mar 31, 2006 at 11:55:30AM -0600" <<<EOQ > On Fri, 2006-03-31 at 08:33, Kai Schaetzl wrote: > > > > I use Argus for monitoring and alerting: http://argus.tcp4me.com > > > ...Initially I was almost going to write a full essay about how > > > much and why I like it :) > > > > I'm using bigsister at the moment. Argus looks similar and not similar. I > > may want to try it out. How does it remote monitoring? Only by SNMP or is > > there an agent application available (short glimpse over the documentation > > doesn't reveal one)? I'm not familiar with SNMP at all, so it's not an > > option for me. > > I've also had 'spong' http://spong.sourceforge.net/ running for > close to 10 years and it still works great although some of > the others may be easier to set up. It doesn't have SNMP at > all but does network probes from a central location and has > an optional local agent for additional information. A nice > touch is that it has a message throttling mechanism where you > can have it notify you about problems but limit both the > number of times for any particular notification and the number > of total notifications it will send. If the machine doing > the probing looses network connectivity for a while it won't > page you thousands of times. Nice, that's one feature I like very much in Argus too :D Besides that it has escalation features, that are also very useful: --- quote http://argus.tcp4me.com/notif.html --- Escalating After attempting to notify someone of a problem repeatedly, you may want to try notifying someone else: escalate: 10 qpage:manager; 30 qpage:cio; 60 qpage:ceo which means: * after 10 minutes page the manager * after 30 minutes page the CIO * after 1 hour page the CEO --- end --- Of course you can send emails too, instead of paging people :) And it may be a good ideea to notify your coleagues, if a problem is not solved within a certain amount of time, before notifying your manager :D All the best, Alex