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I'm trying to find some tool that helps me monitor several things. What are some requirements:

  • Shows results on a web page.
  • Checks existence of files/folders
  • Checks sizes of files/folders
  • Can parse xml files
  • Can have several status depending if it's for instance, after 9pm
  • Ping workstations/Servers to ensure they are on or off
  • create daily/weekly/monthly reports (pdf, html, csv)
  • show daily/weekly/monthly scheduled tasks
  • check if specific users are logged in a machine
  • check which users are logged in in a machine

I've looked into some solutions but could not find what I wanted. Usually tools like nagios are more focused in servers, and spiceworks is not so specific.

At this point I'm using a little powershell script that does several of these items, but before losing more time probably reinventing the wheel, what tools are out there?

Thank you in advance.

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  • These sound like requirements for a custom bit of work.
    – Jeff Ferland
    Mar 21, 2012 at 17:13
  • Yeah, that is why I'm trying to use something already in existence. This is like monitoring for small specific stuff. I have a case that I'm doing a telnet session to check a gsm signal strength. But this stuff could probably be integrated somewhere in some standard format.
    – Artur Carvalho
    Mar 21, 2012 at 17:31
  • I think I'd use an amalgam of various tools that exist and just glue them together. Create scripts, use tools like MCollective, use a write a interface for monitoring it all... but I don't think you'll find this to be a single out-of-the-box application anywhere.
    – Jeff Ferland
    Mar 21, 2012 at 17:34
  • that's really general!! Can we start with what you want to do, why do you want to monitor all this stuff. Looks to me like you may need to split the problems into multiple tools. Most can be scripted
    – The Unix Janitor
    Mar 21, 2012 at 19:30
  • @TheUnixJanitor It is general indeed. I have a big part done with scripts, it updates a file and a page is parsing this file every 10 secs. It checks all kinds of stuff. But now I just wrote about 700-1000 lines of code and instead of writing 10K more I would like to find tools to help me with this. I use this for daily operating tasks.
    – Artur Carvalho
    Mar 21, 2012 at 22:02

2 Answers 2

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You mention not using Nagios in your problem description but this seems like the kind of thing one would normally use Nagios for, writing whatever custom tests you need as plugins to the Nagios agent and aggregating the results using the Nagios console, as as using the built-in plugins for pinging, etc. The time would be spent more on learning how to use the Nagios framework, the actual coding for the custom parts you need should be very simple.

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  • I've been looking into nagios this week. That and graphite. the plugins seems to be a good option. Thanks for your reply @mtinberg
    – Artur Carvalho
    Apr 17, 2013 at 19:53
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If you already have all the scripts for the custom tasks then you can easily integrate them to many of existing monitoring solutions, both software ans cloud-based. You will then get graphs, reports and all the standard stuff monitoring. For instance, you may try Anturis - the one i'm involved with. However, it is more for servers with web stack rather than for corporate IT with users and workstations.

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