Several tools are used for monitoring IT Services, including host/device status, and network status. We’ll look here at a few areas that may help you monitor your IT Services.
For many, resorting to commercial products is a valid decision depending on availability of expertise to install, maintain, make use of open source resources. The following are some of the tools (and their category) we have successfully deployed.
Unfortunately, for the general populace, the only way to find out about vulnerabilities is to monitor announcements made through public forums, such as project mailing lists, or press-releases from various researchers and vendors.
As the diversity of your portfolio or IT services increase, we have to increase the number of information sources to monitor looking for new knowledge, applications related to security and stability of installed systems.
There are a number of standard tools used for monitoring the hosts, devices on your network. Nagios being one of the more popular, although a Google/Bing search will quickly highlight alternatives.
Nagios is very good for monitoring up/down status, and is also able to use SNMP and custom NRPE for determining more detailed status information on hosts. Example things you can monitor using nagios include:
Determing the metrics to ‘measure’ Network Performance is difficult, but at the very least you need to be looking at what is going up and down your network pipes to gauge some aspect of what is happening there.
We’ve effectively deployed, with Nagios, Smokeping and Netflow analysis as tools for monitoring the network performance.