[KLUG Members] Question on network monitors (i.e. big brother, etc).

[John Holland]

At 11:08 PM 11/6/01 -0800, you wrote:
>I'm told about netsaint.  Is this good?  I'm going to set it up tomorrow at
>work, but I can't deploy it until I cahnge the minds of the "powers that
>be".  I'd rather not build one myself from scratch, since that's not very
>income-producing, and I'd like to not have to de-bug.


I assume what you're trying to accomplish is the monitoring of network 
services and notification if any services or servers go down.  If that is 
true, Netsaint is excellent.  Fairly easy to set up, and has a nice web 
based gui.  It has lots of levels of notification, so you can specify 
exactly when and under what circumstances you are paged for a service 
failure.

It is also extensible.  If you can write a script that can tell whether a 
service is up or down, that check can be added to your notifications.  For 
instance, we are serving dynamic web pages using IIS, Cold Fusion, and MS 
SQL Server.  Netsaint can tell me which of these parts have failed.

The only downside is that the author is taking a development break after 
some product name trouble with Saint.