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I'm running Ubuntu server and am looking or a server monitoring utility that is open source/free. We don't need any thing too fancy. Mainly we want to know when the server is offline or if any core services have issues. Preferably something that can send us text messages or emails would be great.

Update

I plan on making this external than the system it's monitoring. At most it will monitor 3 servers.

Update

I'd like to get something that looks professional.

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Munin and monit are a great combination, and you could add ossec if you want to do log analysis, file integrity checking, policy monitoring, rootkit detection, real-time alerting and active response. There are also several cloud-based monitoring companies which have basic free offerings and can monitor from several locations, though of course this wouldn't meet your "open source" requirement. – kaerast Mar 24 '10 at 17:58
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4 Answers

up vote 5 down vote accepted

Nagios is probably overkill for one server, but it works.

Of course remember that the monitoring system has to be external to the system being monitored -- if the monitoring system dies, how do alerts get out?

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You also have OpenNMS and Hyperic, however like Nagios, they are more suited for enterprise level deployments – Zero0ne Mar 24 '10 at 18:17
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up vote 2 down vote

If you just have one server, monit is a bit simpler than Nagios and friends. monit will let you do things like automatically restart services if they die, etc.

But as David mentioned, the monitoring system really needs to be external to the things you are monitoring.

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Monit can monitor external systems too, you know. :) – Ernie Mar 24 '10 at 18:37
Pretty complicated, based on it's manual: mmonit.com/monit/documentation/monit.html#general_operation – Tchalvak Mar 3 '11 at 19:22
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up vote 1 down vote

Munin can be configured to send emails/sms, and have nice charts.

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munin-monitoring.org – Tchalvak Mar 3 '11 at 19:11
Munin seems to be pretty slow, actually: Live monitoring link: munin.ping.uio.no/ping.uio.no/comparison-day.html – Tchalvak Mar 3 '11 at 19:15
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up vote 0 down vote

Don't overlook Xymon, which started life as a BigBrother clone.

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