2

I understand that this question had answered before many times, but I can't find something to help me.

I tried Nagios and Munin from a Linux VM but I don't find them so helpful (maybe my fault on configuration). Does anybody know any other Windows friendly programs for monitoring servers, network?

Thanks in advance for your help.

PS: Not only for network monitoring, mostly for IO, free space, users, traffic, errors, services.

1

7 Answers 7

8

You say that you've tried Nagios but apparently didn't get the results you were after. Nagios WILL do what you want, as will a number of alternatives, but you have to put in a bit of effort to learn how to configure it. If you want something that "just works" you're in for some bad news. All monitoring systems require configuration. The effort spent in learning a good system, such as Nagios, will be more than repaid by the results it can give.

I suggest having another look at what you've already tried but this time take it slowly. Don't try to create an all singing all dancing system from scratch. Create something to monitor a few simple things first. Then, when you understand how to get what you want out of it the rest will be a lot easier to set up and the system will grow. Once you get a good start you may be surprised at just how much you can do with a good monitoring system and how much of your time it will free up.

2
  • I think you're right. I'll uninstall nagios and install it and configured again! But , still I think that nagios give you more general information if sth works or not , and less information of time and quantity or quality of system parts and services running. Things that munin has but i haven't find yet a documentation for Windows.
    – Fotis
    Aug 26, 2010 at 13:57
  • @Fotis, why not use more than one tool? I use a combination of Nagios and MRTG, both running on the same machine, because each has its own strengths. MRTG is particularly good for long term recording. Aug 26, 2010 at 20:50
4

Look at Spiceworks... I've not used it myself but have heard and read good things. But I prefer Nagios and Cacti for these tasks.

2
  • +1, I love Spiceworks! Free and it keeps getting better and better.
    – Hondalex
    Aug 26, 2010 at 16:20
  • Spiceworks doesn't make you add devices manually after the initial scan. So much time saved! Other products seem to handle picking up a few new boxes here and there very poorly in my experience.
    – Garrett
    Aug 27, 2010 at 8:38
2
  • Free
  • Simple
  • Flexible

Pick any 2.

If you just want a simple 'is the box still alive' monitor, there's plenty around. If you have hardware from one vendor, they may have a free product that suits your needs.

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/servers/management/hpsim/index.html

http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/sitelets/solutions/management/server_monitor?c=us&l=en

http://www.tallsoft.com/pingmonitor.htm

3
  • What do you mean?
    – Fotis
    Aug 26, 2010 at 9:02
  • @Fotis: What part is confusing? Aug 26, 2010 at 10:35
  • Nothing for this edited answer, the previous one was a bit misunderstanding.
    – Fotis
    Aug 26, 2010 at 10:42
1

Nagios, Cacti, Zenoss, xabbix are all fine monitoring apps.

Then there is Scripting. For Example, I wrote an Exchange Monitoring script and published it to the Microsoft Script Center Repository

0

If you can run a Linux box, this box is fully able to monitor Windows servers with solutions like Zenoss, Nagios and OpenNMS. In the case of OpenNMS it is written in Java so it should be possible to run it on a Windows server. For the other two it might be easier to install on Linux since there exists packages for most Linux distributions.

We're using Zenoss to monitor Windows servers. Here's a list of ZenPacks which enables you to monitor specific Windows processes such as IIS, Terminal Server, MS SQL and much more.

Here's a thread about disk monitoring of Windows boxes.

3
  • 1
    We use nagios to monitor ALL of our servers. For most Windows Servers the user has to manually configure the SNMP service, as it is disabled by default. Maybe that's the OP's biggest problem.
    – wolfgangsz
    Aug 26, 2010 at 10:36
  • You have the possibility to WMI with Zenoss which I reckon is "the Windows way". Lots of community ZenPacks which uses WMI, but some of them require SNMP anyway. I think the commercial offering from Zenoss does help you with WMI monitoring without SNMP: zenoss.com/product/network-management (click "All features" and search for WMI)
    – tronda
    Aug 26, 2010 at 11:16
  • @wolfgangsz: +1 for Nagios. SNMP can be installed via script, remotely, and can be configured via Group Policy.
    – jscott
    Aug 26, 2010 at 12:31
0

We have 99% Windows server + one Linux box for Nagios ;-)

Nagios does all our internal monitoring. For external monitoring we choose AlertFox, because of their very powerful transaction monitoring features (that is important for our Ajax web applications and Nagios can not do it very well).

0

I'm a fan of Polymon from codeplex.com

I'm monitoring about 80 windows servers and half a dozen unix servers with it. Very intuitive to set up and use, Extremely flexible.

It does require a SQL2005 or higher db server to host its database. Free other than that.