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I'm looking for a solution to monitor multiple Linux servers remotely. I don't need a whole lot of granular data, just basic things like server load and critical error notifications. I'm no Linux guru, so I'm hoping to find an OSX GUI tool / iPhone app or something that sends SMS alerts, but I haven't been able to find anything.

Can anyone suggest a solution?

Thank you in advance for any info you can provide.

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This would be better at serverfault.com. – syrion Nov 18 '10 at 18:49
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migrated from stackoverflow.com Nov 18 '10 at 18:57

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7 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

It might be a bit overkill for what you want but you could look into Nagios. It has a whole slew of features.

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Or Icinga icinga.org , which is a fork of Nagios due to that program's problematic open-core development model. It's a lot prettier and is likely to advance in features more quickly. – mattdm Nov 18 '10 at 21:28
nagios if a framework to send alerts. Munin is good to monitor the numbers (perfs) on a long timescale. Nagios will provide you with a web interface where you can watch the results of generic(or customized) tests. temperature, nb of processes, avaialbility of a service...It will send you a mail in case of problem, but you will have to find a way to make it an SMS. Nagios seems complex, but it is well documented and there are plenty of howto's to make it work. – Rosco Nov 19 '10 at 8:25
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up vote 2 down vote

We like Zabbix at work. It happens to come installed with Ubuntu too.

And it can send SMS, among a whole raft of other things.

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+1, it's not as widely used as Nagios, but a lot easier to deploy – Javier Nov 19 '10 at 1:36
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up vote 1 down vote

I am using QNotifier, and like it.

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up vote 1 down vote

It's not quite what you're looking for - but I'll mention in.

syslog (and syslog-ng) can be configured to take all the logs form a number of machines, and write them to a single machine. This makes viewing and managing important system information easier and centralized.

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up vote 1 down vote

I would definitely consider munin. It allows you monitor and alert on problems. It also generates historical graphs which can be useful when things go wrong.

EDIT: To send SMS alerts you will need an interface of some sort. I have used the email to SMS interface in the past. This often has be enabled per phone. There are also interfaces which will send SMS using a tethered phone. This would require a subscription for an extra phone with appropriate capabilities. However, having a cell phone in the server room when the power goes out may be handy.

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up vote 0 down vote

Munin creates a web page based overview and you can look at on your iPhone's browser.

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up vote 0 down vote

You can use Monit to monitor daemons on one server, it's free of charge.

"Monit is a free open source utility for managing and monitoring, processes, files, directories and filesystems on a UNIX system. Monit conducts automatic maintenance and repair and can execute meaningful causal actions in error situations. "

If you need to monitor many Monit installation on single display, you need to use M/Monit.

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