Off Site Monitor & Forum

[admin]

IP Monitor - http://66.194.198.60:8080/
This will check our router from the outside world. We may also add all of the switches on our network so they can be monitored outside of the network also.

If you want to view server status, please use ipcheck.vortechhosting.com

We have also setup a small forum at http://66.194.198.60 This is only a backup and will only be used in case of a major outage.Please register there and add it to your favorites.

This is in effort to help keep you and your customers as updated as possible.

NOTE: Some of this is still in the works.

[dpyers]

very cool user-defined history there.

[jmbeach]

Thanks for bringing back IPMonitor Brad.

Do you think you'll add any of the web/mail/db servers to it, so we can do histories?

[TheDesigners]

I agree with jmbeach. Histories should be available; we can’t monitor the monitor 24/7.

[generic]

thanks for the effort.

[admin]

We moved away from IPmon because of how much work it is for us to add servers to it. I really don't want to check the servers from to places making it harder for us to manage. IPmon also does not do the SNMP stuff for us like ipcheck.

This system is only to check the network really from out side for total outages. I think you can see stats in IPmon already, at least I think its enabled as I can see them with out logging in.

[jmbeach]

Originally Posted by admin

I think you can see stats in IPmon already, at least I think its enabled as I can see them with out logging in.

But IPMon is only set up for the router & switches, right?

Are there any tools that can do histories for the web and other servers? IPCheck surely doesn't.

[admin]

No but if you want to know we might be able to put together something and pull the stats out once a week.

[Brangwyn]

Heres a long shot .. whats the chance of opening up SNMP on the servers to let us grab some data ourselves? (secured by IP addr of course to prevent unwanted visitors)

Was thinking just a simple Cacti setup that I use for other servers, I'll be setting up a simple ping monitor/graphing soon but some added SNMP info would be fantastic.

[admin]

I really don't want 100's of people using up un-needed bandwidth pulling SNMP stuff.

We have some new techs coming in that may bring some new things to the table and looking at maybe getting a full time programer or two to do some new things as well.

[mresell]

I can see that being an issue. How about an a script to run a weekly report and post. I know ipcheck does reports. I believe these can be published, as well. If manually is too much trouble, then a little automation "seems" pretty easy for that. I am happy w/ ipcheck. Since my monitor is running off it the way I like. I just want a backup outside when things go down and some history to keep up w/ what is going on. Obviously, some one needs to provide it, vortech or us. But then the pinging and extra resources seem needless for this.

[Brangwyn]

I wouldn't exactly say SNMP uses up a lot of bandwidth, this sort of remote monitoring is precisely what SNMP is actually designed to be used for imo, people using those "silly" uptime monitors that poll websites every 60 seconds use up a ton more bandwidth.

What i was actually considering is we have just ONE person pulling the SNMP information out and making it available to everyone who wanted it via a remote server external to Vortech network (was considering offering up one of my own dedicated server monitors for the task .. actually its that old RAQ4 you gave me .. which btw is now running RAQ550 OS and Modded to be 100% silent too)

[admin]

Well each SNMP being pulled every 5 min for each system is about 8 GB each 8 GB x 70 = 560GB. Thats a lot of out side bandwidth that does not really need to be used. SNMP is not really going to help being out side the network if the network is down, hint why I only did ping from out side..

I will see if we can't get something to pull the stats once a week from IPcheck and maybe email it to us to post or if we can make it post it for us. I was doing the before by hand, if you can't tell that only lasted about a month, it got old real fast.. LoL

[TheDesigners]

Originally Posted by admin

...SNMP is not really going to help being out side the network if the network is down, hint why I only did ping from out side..

Sometimes it's hard to see the forest thru the trees

[Brangwyn]

Well each SNMP being pulled every 5 min for each system is about 8 GB each 8 GB x 70 = 560GB

Where you getting that 8GB figure from? I'm collecting SNMP traffic from about 20 servers (every 5 minutes), be lucky if it amounts to more than 5-10 Mb a day for all 20.

If the machines down SNMP does no good either the whole point is being able to maintain our own, or at least a single centralised history for all of us ... if you happy to provide that, thats cool but it is needed. If Vortech requires us to provide downtime details for SLA credits etc then we need to be able to get that info somehow and it's a lot easier if it's done in one place rather than having 100 resellers try and do it like you say. I was just offering to put something together becuase I already have a reasonable system in place for monitoring boxes via SNMP and providing historical data (by way of RRDTool graphs).