One things I’ve told DTC/CIOs at various times is that they need a dashboard. When I reference a “dashboard”, I’m thinking of some type of visual that indicates the health of the network and critical resources. At the state level, we have a map that shows every school district and depicts different colors depending on whether the district has lost connectivity or if all services are running.
Using a tool like Zenoss, districts can create their own network dashboard. I’ve linked to the open source version, though there is an enterprise version as well. This software has several popular open source products behind it, including RRDTool for graphing and MySQL as a database.
Zenoss uses SNMP and WMI to discover and monitor all types of network devices. With it, you can monitor services like HTTP. For critical servers, I could monitor free disk space as well as memory and processor utilization. I could use the WMI piece to allow me to monitor critical errors on servers.
There’s a tutorial video on their community page. As with any monitoring tool, I’m sure that this would take some effort upon initial setup to get everything set for your particular devices and thresholds of interest. However, once you have it set up, this could be a very powerful management aid.
Note that it’s Linux-based, so the pre-packaged downloads are for various flavors of Linux. If you have to run this via Windows, there is a VMWare virtual appliance that you could use in conjunction with VMWare Player to perhaps make it work for you.
Thanks for the post about Zenoss, I'd also like to point out our large and active Zenoss Community at http://zenoss.org. Since it's not too far away, I'd also like to point out we'll be offering free training at Ohio LinuxFest again later in September.
Thanks,
Matt Ray
Zenoss Community Manager
I saw one of the school districts I work with using this tool. I plan to mention it to others and we'll see how it is received. I don't have a great deal of Linux users in my area, so I'd be interested in the best ways to run this in a school district that uses primarily Windows servers. The VM image with something like VMWare Player seemed potentially viable, but there may be better ways to accomplish this.
The VMware image definitely works with VMware Player on Windows and it can be run on ESX as well. It is probably good enough for monitoring 150 or so devices, after that you may run into some of the limitations of the VM and need to bump up the memory and storage. Some Windows-only shops like that Zenoss runs on a Linux box so they have something not on Windows if some sort of virus breaks out. We definitely have a lot of school districts, colleges and universities using Zenoss so you can probably find other users in your situation in our Community.
Good luck!