Splunk is a Great tool to Log Monitoring, Management and More – But what if you want a Different solution or a Cloud/SaaS based Solution? Here’s our Top Picks for Alternatives!
The Best Splunk Alternatives for Log Analysis, Monitoring and Management
The Best PRTG Alternatives for Network Monitoring & Management
Here’s our Top Picks for PRTG Alternatives for Network Management, Monitoring and Infrastructure Managing!
The Best Zabbix Alternatives for Network Monitoring, Management and Bandwidth Analysis!
Zabbix is one of the top tools available today for network monitoring and management. However, it does come with its own shortcomings, and we’re going to go over some of the top alternatives to Zabbix below, but first lets see some areas we can improve on. Here is our list of the top Zabbix alternatives: […]
Top Nagios Alternatives for Network Monitoring, Management and More!
/ January 15, 2025 — Monitoring
Finding an Alternative to Nagios shouldn’t be difficult and cumbersome – So we came up with a list of the Top Nagios Replacements that will help you get monitoring Quickly!
SolarWinds NPM vs Nagios for Network Monitoring and Management Tasks
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor and Nagios XI are two SNMP monitoring suites, that offer a wide array of tools and features for making Network Monitoring & Management simple and efficient but there are other Nagios alternatives too. This article will compare the two, and outline performance in key subject areas. The current version of SolarWinds at […]
PRTG vs Nagios XI for Network Management & Bandwidth Monitoring
/ October 4, 2023 — Monitoring
We’ve compared many programs with each other and we noticed that vs Nagios is a popular comparison that many are looking to breakdown. Here’s our Analysis of the two network monitoring giants.
Zabbix vs Nagios Comparison for Network and Bandwidth Monitoring
/ November 10, 2023 — Monitoring
Generally speaking, one can break down the life-cycle of a Network into three parts: Design Implementation/Configuration Support/Maintenance Network Monitoring falls under the 3rd part of this life-cycle. It allows you to keep an eye on the devices in your network (routers, switches, servers, applications, etc.) so that you can take appropriate actions in the event […]
Ping Monitoring Over a WAN – pf and rf routines
Pf and rf are the two final subroutines we need to discuss for our Ping Monitoring Over a WAN perl script. Both modules use the Net::Ping::External module, which we chose because it works on Windows and GNU/Linux (and because of this, probably works on most every platform that perl runs on). Here is the pf […]
Make Windows Talk to Syslog
One of our networks has just a few production Windows servers on it, and a whole bunch of Linux boxes. Being a Unix sysadmin by trade and inclination, this situation is mostly dreamy except for one thing: auditing the event logs on the Windows servers. We can’t just put our head in the sand and […]
Graphical Ps With Xps
Xps shows *nix processes as a tree. The status is indicated by color. Compile and run: u-1@srv-1 xps $ ls xps-4.2.tar.gz u-1@srv-1 xps $ tar -xzf *.gz u-1@srv-1 xps $ cd xps* u-1@srv-1 xps-4.2 $ u-1@srv-1 xps-4.2 $ ./configure checking for a BSD-compatible install… /bin/install -c checking whether build environment is sane… yes checking for […]
Using Ps-watcher to Monitor Processes
Ps-watcher can run ps periodically and match patterns based on the output of ps. You can check for memory usage, number of processes, etc. Let’s grab the program and try to compile: [root@test psw]# ls ps-watcher-1.0.tar.gz [root@test psw]# tar -xzf *.gz [root@test psw]# cd ps* [root@test ps-watcher-1.0]# ls aclocal.m4 configure install-sh mkinstalldirs README touch.pl AUTHORS […]
Using MSInfo
Do check out msinfo32.exe. Virtually everything that you would want to know about the system configuration of a Windows machine will be revealed with this command. Msinfo32.exe is located under /Program Files/Common Files/Microsoft Shared/MSInfo (at least on our system). If you wish to dump the report to a file, use: msinfo32 /report reportname.txt It takes […]
Disabling Performance Counters on Windows
One extremely annoying thing to get alerted about in the Windows application logs are the Perflib errors: The Open Procedure for service “pcAnywhere” in DLL “C:\Program Files\ Symantec\pcAnywhere\PcaPerfCtrs.dll” failed. Performance data for this service will not be available. Status code returned is data DWORD 0. or: The Open Procedure for service “ISAPISearch” in DLL “QPerf.dll” […]
Automated Log Monitoring with LogSentry and a Central Syslog Server
Part One: Installing and Configuring LogSentry by Urbana Der Ga’had If you haven’t automated the monitoring of your system logs, you’re flying blind. By proactively identifying hardware failures, unusual patterns of user behavior, and intrusion attempts, you can often solve problems before they become painful. festering. scars that won’t heal. Oh yes! In Part One […]
A Simple Perl Load Monitoring Script
I wondered how to monitor load on my GNU/Linux boxen. Sure, there are a lot of canned apps out there. But what if I wanted to use Perl? (IUD SIS, you must use Perl, cuz Perl’s the best… Readin’ from my Camel book like you wanted me… script the pain away…) Anyhoo… I wanna use […]
Automated Log Monitoring with LogSentry and a Central Syslog Server II
Part Two: Configuring a Central Syslog Server By Urbana Der Ga’had In Part 1 of this article we installed and configured LogSentry to automate the monitoring of the system logs on our machine. That’s great if we’ve only got one or two systems, but what if we have a dozen *nix systems, or fifty, or […]
Monitoring Windows CPU Performance With Perl
The Win32::PerfLib module is a glorious way to extract performance data from Windows boxen. Check out this site for more information. We used perl 5.6.1. Here is a script that shows how to use this module: use Win32::PerfLib; $processor = 238; $proctime = 6; while (6 ne 9){ if(my $perflib = new Win32::PerfLib(‘srv-48’)){ $proc_ref0 = […]
Monitoring Servers With GKrellM
GKrellM is a GPL’d multi-platform monitoring program. For a Windows port, see Bill’s Software. In this article we will get GKrellM running on 5 different systems and use client/server mode to connect via SSH, and monitor the systems from a centralized console. We are quite excited about this project because it is client/server (now), has […]
Troubleshooting Slowness/Lockups Over a WAN or VPN
One problem with network monitoring is that latency and router performance do not tell the whole story. What you really want to know is if you can transfer data at the application level across the WAN/VPN. This is particularly useful if you are skimping on your connection to your remote offices by using DSL or […]
Grabbing Top Stats Remotely
One particularly useful tool for systems administration is top. One thing you may not be aware of, is that you can output the information top provides to a file. You may also not know that you can run commands like this remotely via ssh. Here is a short script that demonstrates this: #!/bin/sh /usr/bin/ssh user@domain.com […]
