I stood up a Nagios server a little over 3 years ago, and have never looked back. For the few truly critical things at our church, this works very well. I get messages and can configure text message notifications as well. The GUI is simple and generally clean.
One thing I’m really missing is inventory, though. We used to have InTune for the desktop PCs, and that was pretty cool. We moved away from SBS, because yuck. Now I’m thinking about Spiceworks or something. I’d really like to be able to generate a report of the devices we have, their usage, age, software, etc. I also would like to not pay through the nose for it.
I’ve considered paying the agent fees for something like Labtech or N-Central or something, and that would have the added benefit of allowing remote assistance, something we currently do not have outside of join.me. I’m not really looking for something to replace Nagios, but something that can supplement it and rope in additional features and end user devices.
In the mean time, here’s our current monitoring platform, recently upgraded:
Can’t tell which it is? Take a closer look:
Battery backed RPi 2, mounted simply to a piece of plexiglass. Sorry for the terrible phone pictures, I have a Cosmos from forever ago. If you wanna see some better pictures, I can take them next week.
The interface can’t be beat:
With some detailed monitoring:
Soon I’ll add in level monitoring to the printers. I haven’t done an SNMP walk on my network in a good while, so depending on what else I find, I may rope several other things in. Also, you can’t tell from here, but it will message me if our website goes down, or takes too long to load, which is really nice too. All in all, I highly recommend Nagios.