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Sofware to monitor system preformances

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by cmandley

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Our IT department is in the process of restructuring our staff, and were implementing organizationl changes. The group that I'll belong to is Production Systems which we will focus on the daily operation of generating applications and key business applications and establish a production discipline and consistency in quality control. Our objective is to improve system monitoring & preformances, the problem is that we do not have any of these software tolls in our location. Were looking for software that will help us to improve monitoring and to alert us to problems before they strike. We are an NT and UNIX environment, and cost is a factor to what we what to purcahse. I welcome all comments.

3 replies

by erikdr

With rough requirements it is diffult to come up with precise answers...

Let me start with 3 different kinds of monitoring and the way to have it done 'free', then afterwards you can compare the licensed tools and their prices with the work they save you.

1) Fault management. Any real errors in terms of technical components. Done by:
- Eventlog (Windows) and syslog (most Unix environments)
- SNMP traps (network black boxes)
All logs can be monitored by scripting tools, traps can be monitored by the free tools supplied with the black boxes. Commercial tools do both stuff in a more sophisticated manner and add intelligent agents using Unix metrics and Windows WMI calls.

2) Performance (and uptime) management - from outside.
Simply have an agent running on a browser (or fat client app), measuring
- Whether app server works at all (PING etc.)
- Responsetime for full page or for more simple tasks like DNS query

Again, commercial apps do this on a higher level.

3) Performance management - from inside.
Runs on the appserver itself. The most basic tooling would be Windows Performance Monitor or similar Unix tools. Gives responsetimes per system action, processor/disk/memory load etc.

Commercial tools just do thison a higher level with graphics, trending, more metrics etc.

Hope this helps,

- The Netherlands

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