I have a lot of web servers and I use CopperEgg to monitor them. The reason is I want a "dashboard" of all my servers showing graphs of CPU/Load/Memory etc. See https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid ... =1&theater for what it looks like. These graphs update every couple of seconds, so its a live view.

One reason I chose CopperEgg was because they have a process list you can view at any instant in time (5 second intervals). So say 3 hours ago I had a big spike in CPU I could go see what process was using it. Well that part does not work well at all. It does not actually report the correct time I choose or CPU/Memory values, and lists "other" as say 80% CPU for example which does not help at all. I have reported it to them, I dont think they can fix it. So it looks pretty, entices you in, but the only use are these graphs.

This system costs me approx. £50 per month for 11 servers. Its not much but I still want to see if there are any others that can do it for less to save money. It is just a bunch of server graphs with live updating.

Many others are too expensive... their model assumes its a large organisation or based on dedicated servers with high profit per server. So a $49 per server month approach (New Relic) is just way to expensive for our setup which are Linode VPSs with say approx. 10 websites on it. Basically more smaller servers (less profit per server) rather than 1 large dedicated and higher profit. So New Relics pricing is just not possible with our setup.

So therefore I wanted to look into other providers. There are a few I found that do this, but wondered if anyone else has any other suggestions?

Here are a few I tried:
http://newrelic.com/ -> As stated too expensive. the free account does not provide the dashboard.
http://www.bijk.com/ -> pricing good, not sure if they have pretty enough graphs with live updates yet (we have a 40" monitor in the office with these, they need to be pretty! )
https://scoutapp.com/ -> too expensive for 11 servers, and found it a bit tricky to setup monitoring
http://www.nagios.org/ -> free but difficult to setup I could not get it to work and spent too much time trying. CopperEgg/New Relic is like 5 minutes. Dont know if it has multiple servers on a dashboard with live updates.
Munin -> same issues as Nagios
http://portal.monitis.com/ -. I actually used these before for pinging websites, not internal resource monitoring. Pricing is good so I may give them a go again, although the interface/dashboard is not great and not so easy as CopperEgg.


So wondered if there are any others that are like CopperEgg but lower cost? If not then I will stay with CopperEgg but just interested to know what else is out there that can do it.

Thanks

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Web Development Agency in South Wales

I personally use a combination of Monit and Munin.

Munin for graphs, it's pretty much install it via apt/yum/whatever, configure your web server to serve the html files and you're ready to go.

Monit I use for alerts, it can run arbitrary commands so say CPU is high for 10 Minutes it can run ps and email the output.

Best of all, they're freeeeeee.

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Paid support
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I tried Munin/Monit, I couldn't get them to work. I posted a question on the support channel/forum whatever it was and got no reply, so gave up.

But they dont do a live update every few seconds do they??

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Web Development Agency in South Wales

Monit can check as often as you like, I have it set to every 60 seconds.

Munin well it depends which version you have <2.0 is every 5 minutes, >=2.0 can be set using the update_rate configuration option.

_________________
Paid support
How to ask for help
1. Give details of your problem
2. Post any errors
3. Post relevant logs.
4. Don't hide details i.e. your domain, it just makes things harder
5. Be polite or you'll be eaten by a grue

I'm using Zabbix, which features both data logging (at configurable intervals) and alerts.