Monitor.us - Great free off-site monitoring

Picture this - your ISP just went down, taking your web sites with it.  Not to worry!  You have monitoring in place on your network to let you know when one of your servers or sites is offline, but...

Your monitoring solution sends its notifications via the very same internet connection.

How will you ever know that your sites are down?  If you have the resources you can set up monitoring from an external source as well, but what if that's not an option?  If this scenario keeps you awake at night, then perhaps you should look into Monitor.us.  Monitor.us allows you to monitor not only HTTP and HTTPS, but other services such as FTP, SSH and MySQL.  The service is easy to setup and the free version offers many options.  Here is the dialog that you get when creating a new monitor:

Several options are available and the interface is very easy to understand.  In addition to external monitoring,  you can also install agents on hosts to report back to Monitor.us on various system attributes.   I haven't tried this option, but I am sure that there are those who might find this useful.

Monitoring intervals for the free version are 30 minutes, but more frequent checks as well as increased monitoring sources are available for a charge.  With the free version you also get a weekly email report giving you a summary of uptime and SLA's.

I use Monitor.us in conjunction with Opsview so that if my ISP circuit goes down I still have a failsafe.  Between the two, it makes a pretty complete monitoring setup.

NetApp stats in Splunk

I just recently found a great new app for Splunk - the Splunk App for NetApp ONTAP.  If you only have a small NetApp environment, trying to get quick and easy historical stats couldn't be easier.  NetApp does provide the OnCommand suite which gives reporting, but to be completely honest, for small environments I just don't think it's worth it.  OnCommand is large, bloated, cumbersome to deploy and, well, crap.  

The Splunk App for NetApp Ontap deploys in minutes and easy to set up.  You get great insight into your environment right out of the box, and did I mention that it's free?  Yes, free!  Like so many other great apps out there for Splunk, it is community developed and supported.  It's well worth your time to check it out.  If you have the slighted bit of experience with Splunk, then you'll find that it is very simple to write custom reports using the app and extract virtually any kind of capturable data from your NetApp filers.  Needless to say, my OnCommand install is about to get nuked!

How many does it take?

So, we're moving old equipment today and this just struck me as a bit funny:

How many IT guys does it take to install a shelf in a rack?

"Four.  Three plus some idiot to take the picture," as my boss replied.

Touché.

Opsview review (finally)

Well folks, after an extremely extended period of silence I'm going to try and get back to keeping this blog updated.  As promised, here are my thoughts on Opsview.

I've been a fan of Nagios for a long time, but as anyone who has used it knows, it can be a pain to maintain in it's basic form and is ugly to boot.  This is where Opsview comes into play.  It is a very well thought out and implemented iteration of Nagios that addresses many complaints that I have with the plain vanilla package.

I thought you were dead....

"Not hardly," as John Wayne would say in Big Jake.  Fourth quarter is always a busy time at work, but it has been fairly hectic for the past six months in general.  During that time I have pushed out a distributed Opsview deployment which is working very well.  I plan on elaborating more on that project in the next week or so.

Nagios evolved?

Look in the near future for some info on a monitoring product I ran across a while back called Opsview.  It's a super-polished version of Nagios that looks very promising.  I haven't had a chance to get it up and running yet (hence the frazzled bit in the blog description), but plan on doing so in the next week or two.  They have released an Android app that is mated to the normal web app that looks very promising!

Stay tuned for more info...

Ever heard of grammar check?

Just saw this in an email from our MS Exchange admin.  Apparently Microsoft only makes a product with grammar check, but doesn't bother using it!