Network monitoring tools?

[Snapster]

One for all the Network Admins out there, if any of you can help.

What I'm basically looking for is some software, that can monitor pcs (say 20-30) on a small network from a central point. The monitoring is basically disk space use, memory, cpu, event log, services, uptime, availability etc.

Cost is an issue, I don't mind paying a little (say up to $300/£150) if the software is really worth it and justifies the cost, but I feel there must be something out there that's either free under the GPL or at least low cost.

What I also want it to do is send alerts (preferably email) to a user when any of the monitored items hits certain thresholds etc. What I've found so far is tools that will do half the stuff I want, and I don't really want to be installing multiple tools where one can suffice. The software can be agent or agent-less (the later preferred), website collation of reports would also be nice. I've looked at hyena, serverscheck, monitormagic so far and they aren't 'that' bad but they seem to be dogged with review comments saying 'cheaper/better' out there!

Any help would be appreciated.

 

[nweaver]

you most likely won't get what you want for the price, assuming you are looking for windows based. You COULD use an snmp agent and do queries and write a perl backend to parse that data on a linux box, but that's alot of work.

Other then that, there are lots of programs that will do this (in windows) but I think they are more then the 300 you are asking for.

Centennial Data
Altiris Asset Management
IBM's Tivoli
HP's Openview
Microsoft's SMS
INtel has Landesk
Erecent (Incredible, but WAY out of your range)
Express Metrics (Decent one, not sure on price)
Tally (didn't like this one much)
Scalable SOftware (Lower price, I think, and decent software, iirc)
CA Unicenter
Marinba
Novell Zenworks


that get you started?

 

[Winchester]

NetIQ AppManager for most of this and NetIQ Security Manager will do the event log monitoring, together they will do all of this, but it would be around $$$$. It works great once it is setup. We used it to monitor/manage over 120 servers.

 

[HeroOfPellinor]

Well, I think you can probably use Performance Monitor to do most of what you want and that's free.

 

[nweaver]

permon would be a biotch to setup across the network and automate emailing. There is a reason this is a big industry.

 

[imported_Dimicron]

Look up What's Up Gold. Can't remember what the name of the company that makes it, possibly ipswitch? I remember at a previous job having a PC running it 24/7. We had skinned the program up so it looked like a computer in Star Trek: TNG (Complete with the ST computer's voice telling us a warning for if any important PC's were failing one of it's checks or we were unable to connect to the internet for any reason).

 

[Snapster]

Cheers for all the suggestions, I'll look into them.

 

[warcrow]

IPswitch makes WuG (Whats up Gold), but its now considered a legacy app. They are moving over to Whats up Professional. If you want to do diskmontiroing and such, its possible with this product. But you wil have to isntall SNMP informant on all the machines, configure/install mibs, and then get them to talk. Its not as easy as it sounds, but its alot of fun toset up

PM if you have an questions.

 

[imported_Dimicron]

Originally posted by: warcrow
IPswitch makes WuG (Whats up Gold), but its now considered a legacy app. They are moving over to Whats up Professional. If you want to do diskmontiroing and such, its possible with this product. But you wil have to isntall SNMP informant on all the machines, configure/install mibs, and then get them to talk. Its not as easy as it sounds, but its alot of fun toset up

PM if you have an questions.

It's been about 4-5 years since I played with it. It was a fun app to set up and keep running. We had control to do whatever we wanted, and the app just worked. If WU Pro is as good as WuG, then it gets my :thumbsup::thumbsup:

:beer: