I'm notice that when I have more than 5 servers need to monitor, I'm periodically forgetting about updating each of them and checking them resources usage.<p>Seems that Canonical's landscape is pretty good for that, but canonical's support said that payment plans starts from 100 servers =/<p>If you have 5+ servers – does you use anything to monitor and update all of them? If use – what is it?
Currently I just use pingdom to check availability, but I'm really interested on other people needs, so I'm more interested on a related set of questions:<p>What would your ideal monitoring system have? Would it be web based? terminal based? Zero install effort or full customizability? What would you like to monitor? Just monitoring? Alerting too? Just servers or also containers?
Last night I grabbed a JavaScript text to speech script <a href="http://responsivevoice.org/" rel="nofollow">http://responsivevoice.org/</a> and tossed it into my laptops Apache public directory and wrote a few lines for Ajax request to a script I tossed on each server that would just return some status info stuff like<p>exec('uptime',$response);
echo $response;<p>In around 15 minutes I now have a siri like bot to take with me that will alert me to anything funky which is necessary after a week of some rogue processes.
Nagios is pretty standard for monitoring.<p>Administration is usually custom automation. There are a lot of tools for this, and they all have good and bad, so you should just go with what is most accessible to you.
We use several things including custom scripts to monitor and alert when needed. However our main tool is ipMonitor. We monitor hundreds of servers in multiple environments (dev, test, prod) and the thing that I don't like is all the noise that gets created. It makes it hard to find the real important issues. I believe monitoring is great, but any alert should have an actionable items to perform.
I just use terminator terminal, multi-terminal grid. One terminal per server showing htop via ssh.<p><a href="http://gnometerminator.blogspot.com.au/p/introduction.html" rel="nofollow">http://gnometerminator.blogspot.com.au/p/introduction.html</a><p><a href="http://hisham.hm/htop/" rel="nofollow">http://hisham.hm/htop/</a>
<a href="http://cloudstats.me/server-monitoring/" rel="nofollow">http://cloudstats.me/server-monitoring/</a> almost ideal, but has several pitfalls: closed source, $5 for server, and doesn't have package manager monitoring.
<a href="http://scoutapp.com" rel="nofollow">http://scoutapp.com</a><p>Dead simple to install and use. Fancy graphs, lots of useful plugins for monitoring processes.<p>Using it for more than a year, no problems, responsive support. $15/server/month.
If you're hosted on AWS by chance, check out their "CloudWatch" services. Monitors everything I usually need, sends alerts as-needed, etc.