[SATLUG] program or cron job to ping internal devices & email

[Brad Knowles]

On 1/16/08, Ed Coates wrote:

>  Big Brother (or whatever it's calling itself) comes to mind.  Only
>  problem is that you need an agent on each box you want monitored.  It
>  can also monitor a whole lot more and send email/pages and things

For the lowest level of management (do I get a response to ping or 
not?), tools like Big Brother or Big Sister should not require any 
kind of agent on the remote end.  In fact, I think low-level 
monitoring tools like Big Brother or Big Sister don't require any 
kind of agent on the remote end, although they may be able to make 
use of them.

Lower-level tools like Big Brother and Big Sister are limited by the 
fact that ping packets are treated differently from normal TCP/IP 
packets by many routers and switches, so a host may respond to a ping 
and you don't see it because the network was busy and the response 
was dropped.  They also suffer from the problem that they may respond 
to ping but not actually be operating properly.


More full-featured network monitoring/management tools like Nagios or 
Zenoss will require an agent on the remote end to get full monitoring 
and management, but again I don't think they necessarily require any 
kind of agent on the remote end to do the most basic monitoring.

-- 
Brad Knowles <brad at shub-internet.org>
LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>