System and Network Monitoring Expertise, Tools, and Services

Resources

Tools

There are a wide variety of open source and freely available tools for system and network monitoring, as well as many commercial tools. At Monistics, we make use of the best of those tools, along with custom enhancements and our own internal tools, to implement the best monitoring solutions for our customers.

Some of the most significant freely available monitoring tools that we use are listed below.

Nagios Network Monitor

By Ethan Galsted, Nagios is under active development, has a good web interface, good status display, and a very active user community.
http://www.nagios.org/

MRTG

Multi-Router Traffic Grapher - graphs almost anything.
http://ee-staff.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/mrtg/

Cricket

A follow-on to MRTG - faster, more flexible, and more "interesting" configuration.
http://cricket.sourceforge.net/

orca

"Orca is a tool useful for plotting arbitrary data from text files onto a directory on a Web server." Also comes with a very nice interface to the SE Toolkit for Solaris. By Blair Zajac.
http://www.orcaware.com/orca/

Documents

An Introduction to Monitoring

Monistics' John Sellens wrote an intoructory article on System and Network Monitoring for the June 2000 issue of ;login:, the magazine of the USENIX Association.