In the previous article we’ve shown how easy it is to integrate popular Nagios server monitoring commands, or plugins, with Monitis M3 monitoring framework.

However, given the fact you have a working Nagios configuration, which is vast and complex – I can sympathize with your unwillingness to actually migrate to Monitis.

Nagios, a systems monitoring software

What’s Nagios? – Nagios is a rather simplistic monitoring software. And I like simple things. Nagios’ responsibility is not necessarily to draw nice graphs for your boss or collect data you may or may not need.

Nagios simply decides whether your system runs properly. And for this question there is a very explicit answer – a YES or a NO. Nagios will alert you if the answer is a NO.

In the following article I’m going to show how easy it is to integrate Nagios with Monitis.

Everyone likes freebies, especially sysadmins. We’ve offered free services longer than premium ones. Monitor.us, our free website monitor, has been up for about 5 years now. This post will cover eight free and useful web tools that Monitis offers for every website and systems administrator.

1. Monitor.us is a free monitoring service that checks the availability and performance of websites and servers. Users can enter all their website URL’s, monitor them from global locations, and receive reports and alert notifications when a URL goes down. Unlike other free monitors, Monitor.us also offers free internal monitoring, so users can check the CPU, Memory and Disk utilization on their servers, among other metrics. This recent post shows how to set up free internal monitoring in Monitor.us. All free monitoring is done at 30 minute intervals and users can upgrade to Monitis for 1-minute intervals. We recently changed the domain name to monitor.us from mon.itor.us, but both URL’s till take you to the free service.

This blog is on the 12th annual System Administrator Appreciation Day. Thank you, sysadmins for all your hard work, long hours and sleepless nights spent on deploying and maintaining servers and other IT infrastructure.

Many of us at Monitis started as sysadmins. It is a tough task. It’s like being a Swiss Army knife – you wear many hats and do various jobs around installing, configuring, securing servers and network infrastructure, among other things. Then, you are expected to keep the infrastructure running 24×7, which sometimes means coming to the office in the middle of the night.

To help sysadmins to automate some of these tasks, we started developing monitoring tools for them. We started with an external web site monitoring service that checks the availability and the response time of your website from multiple locations. Later we added more monitoring services for servers and applications.

Unfortunately, management types often don’t fully understand and appreciate the complexity of sysadmins’ jobs. At times, it is hard to explain the need for sysadmin tools and obtain budgets for them.

To help you with this task, we are announcing a System Administrator Appreciation Day special, a 50% of all of our sysadmin tools. Use SYS50 coupon code at checkout. We will be offering this discount from Thursday at Midnight PST through the weekend.

Sign up now at http://portal.monitis.com/index.php/plans/plan-builder

A rabbit?

Writing custom monitors for Monitis is easy. On monitisexchange you can find many examples for custom monitors. However, now I bring you a surprise.

It is only rarely after I write a piece of code and represent it to others that I feel like pulling a rabbit out of a hat. On this occasion – there is something even better than a rabbit!

I’m proud to present you this time with ‘Monitis Monitor Manager‘, or M3 (M³) in short.

Mon.itor.us is our 100% free website and server monitoring service. It is unique among similar services in that it imposes no cap on the number of URL’s monitored. As a result, we have some users monitoring hundreds, even thousands of URL’s from one account, for free, forever. That’s great, but what if you want to upgrade to our premium service, Monitis? Until now, you had to set everything up from scratch, but we’ve decided to make it extremely easy with a new Upgrade Wizard. It walks you through easy steps that allow you to select the monitors you’d like to keep and/or add in your upgraded account.

Nagios is a widely used monitoring software for systems and networks. It provides the flexibility to monitor anything on your systems or networks using a script or plugin.  Known for having plugins and scripts available to monitor your needs, Nagios’ the interface and user friendliness leaves much to be desired.  Plus you have to maintain and monitor another server to store and analyze the data provided through your Nagios plugins and scripts.  And worst of all, if your Nagios server or network fail – you may not get an alert at all when you need them the most.

A hosted system monitor gathering your stats is a good way to ensure that alerts get to you, and having it have nice tools and interfaces is definitely a bonus.  Monitis is a hosted systems and networks monitoring solution that offers a simple user interface, with powerful tools, and a distributed network to prevent any service failures  blocking your alerts.  It will free up your sysadmins from monitoring their monitoring servers, and will allow them to focus on the issues rather than looking for the issues.

In past posts, we’ve talked about how you can create a Windows WMI custom monitor and automatically upload values into them. But now you may be wondering how to gather all the, well, valuable, value that is needed to effectively monitor your systems.

In this article, Monitis provides a list of WMI queries that can be used in your script to get the data you need.