Monitoring the health and uptime of your server is very important. You have to ensure that your server is running fine so that the users connected to it does not experience any downtime. Hence it is wise to have a monitoring tool to keep a watch on your server all the time for you.
Following are some of the Popular and widely used Monitoring tools available for free online for both Windows and Linux servers.
ZABBIX
Platform: Windows/ Linux
www.zabbix.com
Zabbix is the ultimate enterprise-level software designed for real-time monitoring of millions of metrics collected from tens of thousands of servers, virtual machines, and network devices. It has great visualization support including user-defined views, zooming, and mapping. It can send out alerts via email, SMS or instant message.
Zabbix setup and configuration is quite easy ensuring a low learning curve and therefore, low cost of ownership. A centralized monitoring system allows storing all information (configuration and performance data) in a relational database for easier processing and re-use of data
PERFORMANCE CO-PILOT
Platform: Windows/Linux
www.pcp.io/index.html
Performance Co-Pilot, PCP for short, is a system performance and analysis framework. It gathers metrics from multiple hosts and analyzes them in real-time. It has a wonderful, easy to interpret graphical output format. It observes trends to help you identify abnormal performance patterns. You can also customize make your own monitoring and reporting solutions using the APIs.
The Linux agent exports a broad range of performance data from kernels since 2.0.36 or later. This includes coverage of activity in the areas of CPU, disk, memory, swapping, network, NFS, RPC, filesystems, and per-process statistics.
NAGIOS
Platform: Windows/Linux
www.nagios.com
Nagios – It is an open source application that focuses on system monitoring, protocol monitoring, application monitoring, database monitoring, log monitoring and bandwidth monitoring among others. There are various Nagios agents available in the market that perform multiple functions.
Some of the key features are -
1.Centralized view of entire monitored IT infrastructure
2.Detailed status information available through web interface
3.Fast detection of infrastructure outages
4.Alerts can be delivered to technical staff via email or SMS
5.Escalation capabilities ensure alert notifications reach the right people
CACTI
Platform: Windows/ Linux
www.cacti.net
Cacti is mainly a front-end graphing tool for system data, but it can also handle data collection. Data gathering happens in a "cron job" via an external script that feeds metrics which Cacti stores in a MySQL® database. With Cacti, you can create all kinds of graphs that can be displayed and organized in a number of different ways. Cacti works with user permissions, allowing certain users access to specific charts or graphs.
GANGLIA
Platform: Windows/Linux
www.ganglia.info/
Ganglia is an open source (BSD license) monitoring system designed especially for high-performance computing systems, such as clusters and grids. It has a scalable and distributed architecture based on a hierarchical design targeted at federations of clusters. It leverages widely used technologies, such as XML for data representation and XDR for data transport. One of its goals is to engineer data structures and algorithms for maximum efficiency, resulting in overheads for each node.
