I’ve been working on setting up a monitoring solution for my home network. In the past, I had used Cacti but never really got the hang of it. The layout of it was hard to follow and it didn’t have a good way to easily monitor all the components. It was ok, but wasn’t what I was looking for.
At work we use Zabbix. It’s a very capable solution to monitoring my home network and I like it. My only reservation is that I would like experience with more solutions than what I use at work. This would be a hobby project, so I want to learn and not just rehash what I do at work.
So, when I reimaged my servers over Christmas, I changed my monitoring solution to Nagios Core. There were many reviews of it being enterprise grade like Zabbix or Cacti. And while many said it would be more difficult to set up, they mentioned that it would be bulletproof once set up.
I will admit, it was a pain to set up initially. I spent many an hour at work during down time SSH’ing home and editing config files and running tests. Thus far, I’ve set up one of the servers (Palpatine), some functions on the primary router (Luke), the two wireless access points, the modem, and tests to my personal website and simple up/down tests on some major websites. I’m hoping to set up monitoring on the other server (Vader), the bandwidth utilization on the router and one of the switches (Porkins). I’m also looking to implement graphing of many functions using the nagiosgraph plugin.
I’m on the fence about setting up monitoring on my desktop, mobile devices, or any of the VMs I’ve created.
At the moment, I don’t use the VMs much and thus by monitoring them I would be generating error notifications of being down much of the time. I will do it eventually because from a learning standpoint I would get used to working with SNMP on various OS’s.
As to the various mobile devices, they would create many error notifications that it is offline. I think it is best to not monitor them. I think it is best not to try to monitor the Xbox or the TV either =D
With my desktop, it runs 24x7x365 and thus I wouldn’t get offline notifications. The issue with it is that I have both Windows and Linux on it and switch back and forth. I don’t believe that I would be able to accurately monitor it due to the fact that it would show up in Nagios as two different computers. There may be a way to associate the records together, but I’m not entirely sure how to do this. So, maybe at a later date after some research 🙂