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Network Monitoring Systems

Gone are the days when computer systems would be ON only during office or “day time” hours. With offices, employees, clients, vendors all spread across time zones and continents, the need for information to be available 24x7 is more acute than ever. It could be a remote employee requiring access to some files in the central server or a client wanting to look at your website.

The growth of the Internet has made geographical boundaries irrelevant. A person sitting in Hong Kong can open an email account with a provider based in Europe. They may also be interested in visiting websites in the United States. So email providers as well as website administrators need to provide 24x7 uptime for their systems. Email being such a critical and almost de facto mode of communication, downtime in any email service can lead to chaos.

Now, these servers are all placed in “data centers” with power backups and high speed lines. And as most of them run extremely stable operating systems and software, the systems run smoothly for the most part. However, there are times when due to hardware failure, software failure or network related attacks, a system may go down. These cases are few and far apart, but when it happens, a lot of people can be affected. Having someone physically monitor all these servers all the time would require the population of a medium sized country, not to mention the extremely high costs involved. And one cannot really wait for users to file reports about service unavailability can we?

So what do we do?

The answer lies in monitoring the systems using applications developed specifically for this purpose. We use a computer to keep check on other computers. And use a computer to keep check on the computer that keeps a check on other computers!... and so on. You get the idea.

These server monitoring systems (or network monitoring systems as they are often called) will not only keep track of one of more systems that you want to maintain but also inform you in case any problems are observed.

So what are the essential features of a network monitoring system?

While there are many products and applications, both free and commercial, available to monitor your systems, the fundamental requirements are the same.

1. To ensure that the server or machines are up and running.

2. To ensure that all services on it (email, website, ftp) are up and running.

3. To ensure that all services are working correctly.

4. To monitor the network traffic.

All servers have IP addresses and all services running on the machine “listen” to requests on some port. By continuously pinging the machine and the various ports from remote machines or even the same machine, we can keep an eye on the system. This of course was a highly simplified explanation on how the monitoring works.

Some popular Network monitoring tools are:

Nagios (http://www.nagios.org)

One of the popular host and services monitoring systems, Nagios is an Open Source, freely available application designed to run on Linux and other *nix operating systems.

Its key features include, but not limited to:

• Monitoring of network services such as (SMTP, POP3, HTTP, NNTP, PING)
• Monitoring of host resource (processor load, disk and memory usage, log files etc.)
• Simple plugin design allows users to develop their own host and service checks.
• Web interface for viewing current network status, notification etc.
• Support for implementing redundant and distributed monitoring system.
• And many more. (http://www.nagios.org/about/

Monit (http://www.tildeslash.com/monit/)

Another very popular open source and freely available server monitoring system, monit is very easy to configure. It is designed as an autonomous system and does not depend on plugins nor any special libraries to run.

Its features include, but not limited to:

• Monitoring services in active, passive and manual mode.
• Setup dependencies between services.
• Check network services and host resources.
• Extensible, flexible and configurable alert notification.
• Ability to setup rules to act preemptive before an error occurs.
• TCP, UDP and Unix Domain sockets are supported.
• And many more..

A server or network monitoring system is not only desirable but a must to ensure that your systems are running continuously without any hurdles.

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