Reported by Anonymous

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With an army of support engineers a system built on RAID, UPS, and Clustering techniques the dream of 99.9% uptime may be a possibility. But for the vast majority of us it’s just not feasible. No matter what the manufacturer claims, servers crash and that’s a fact. The best we can do is be prepared to deal with them. Working as a contractor I come across so many situations were I wished HP OpenView or CA Unicenter was monitoring my system and telling me that the router had failed or the PDC was running low on disk space. Yet with a basic installation coming in at around £20,000 its not surprising that so few organizations have implemented such solutions. This was until I worked for a local council in the north of Scotland that was running a package called Server Monitor. Priced at under £200 this piece of Shareware was looking after their entire 30+ server farm plus routers, switches etc. Notifying you when the web server went down or the Oracle database was failing to respond. It would even try and fix the problem on its own in certain circumstances. Server Monitor supports most types of protocols and services, including TCP/IP, ICMP, IPX/SPX, NetBIOS, Oracle Server, Novell Netware, MS SQL, POP3/SMTP, HTTP and more. It's also capable of monitoring disk space, checking file existence and reading NT Event logs on local and remote systems. Recently the program has been enhanced to allow users to custom build their own checks and their seams to be a thriving community in this field. With plugins now available for Printer, SNMP, CPU and Memory monitoring to name a few. Once a problem is detected Server Monitor can notify network administrators in a number of ways. The program may automatically notify you via e-mail, SMS-formatted pages, WinPopup or NT/2000's Messenger Service and even through ICQ. You can set it up to restart services, reboot servers, run batch files or other external applications. The program is flexible and easy to configure. You add new systems by inputting information into a tabbed dialog box, such as server type, IP address, username/passwords and other pertinent parameters. It can send notifications whenever a server crashes or "wakes up" and play custom sound effects. Though Server Monitor is automated, you may run checks on-demand. Server Monitor generates a series of text- or HTML-formatted reports. These log files may include a defined set of details to cover event log and server error statistics. A server availability report and statistics-based log are available as well. Again you can write your own reports or get the guys at PureNetworking to do it for you. This shareware version is fully functional, and an evaluation key will let you use it for 30 days. Its true that Server Monitor is no way as flexible or scalable as OpenView and the likes but it doesn’t cost anywhere near the price. I had an old colleague ring me up the other day to tell me that he installed Server Monitor on a site that was using one of the big boys monitoring software. He said that they had a server failure and Server Monitor notified him before the other product even noticed they had a problem. At last 99.9% uptime is an affordable dream for every organization.
http://www.purenetworking.net/Products/ServerMonitor/ServerMonitor.htm