Hi Everyone,

Here's what we got.

We have about 100 Dell Power Edge Servers. They range from 1550 thru 6850. We currently monitor the hardware via Dell Diagnostics.

Here's the problem.

Logging into the server administrator and then reading thru logs is very very time consuming, let alone after reading a handful of logs, you get lazy and start to miss things, such as power supplies not working. Even worse, he wants me to log when I checked the server, and what was wrong or right with them at the time.

Qustion.

What does everyone else do about their servers? I imagine on a 24x7 production environment you don't wait for something to break down, you try to monitor it somehow. Is there any solution that will run diagnostics on the hardware , and then either email me the results, log it to a file, or alert me when something has gone wrong? Or even some good diagnostics that I can script to email me would work good too.

Many thanks for any possible solutions.

Have you had a look at Nagios? It sounds like it will do what you're looking for...

We are actually running nagios now. But unless I missed something on nagios exchange, I haven't found something that monitors hardware. We use nagios for all sorts of software checks, like if apache is running and the like. But I didn't see nagios having one to check the harddrives, or if the power supply is working.

Sorry about that - for hardware based stuff it's worth looking at lm_sensors. On their useful links page they have other sites providing lm_sensors based tools that report on hardware based stuff.