Hi,

I run a number of VM's and use Cacti to monitor the general health and traffic of these. I am looking to have a 'quick view' page which gives me a red, amber or [hopefully all] green status of the boxes or services on them and is available externally [web page].

Ideally for example I would like to offer my Plex shared users a page which shows the status of the Plex server and allow a custom message [upcoming downtime etc].

Can anyone recommend a suitable application? Thoughts?

I use OmniVM engine to manage my vm's. Quite happy with it I am

The VM's are managed through the ESXi hypervisor client. I am more looking at checking the status of the Plex service and using this information to build a status page.

Id use smart php-based script and some checks done via $_GET command. Treat your vm's as forms and try to get specific info from them in this way. Should do the trick

The OP isn't asking for VM management...they want to display status of a VM server to an end-user.
Oh? How would this 'do the trick'? How would you treat a SERVER as a 'form'??? Got some code you can post that shows how you'd do this? Again, please don't post incomplete/misleading/bad advice.

OP, since you already have cacti in place, have you considered using the built-in user management functions to create a read-only user for one server/server-group, and then only let them view the server preview page? That would give them up/down statistics, network IO, disk IO, etc., from one page, for their one server. No need to re-invent the wheel.

That being said, if the user management control in cacti isn't granular enough for you, you could just view the page source for that one VM server, and shove out a VERY simple web page for them. If you've got your Apache server set up to handle symbolic links, you can just have the web page in a user-accessible directory, with links to the graphs pointing back to the cacti directory. They'll update, but that one user would then only be able to view that ONE page, with their graphs...nothing else. And you can do it with a simple "save page as" when you view the source, and only have to modify the image path name for the symlink.

Thanks TB0ne.

I did consider Cacti and it's graphs but it gives too much information in this instance.

I am currently looking at polling the applicable service status and writing this to a file on a shared folder on the monitoring server, the server can then poll the local file and return the results.

This should allow me to achieve the required results with limited interaction between the 'status' machine and the rest of the hosts.

Well, if that meets your needs that's great. Personally, I'd just get whatever graphs that Cacti was already generating, and put them on a page...since you could just get ONE (or two, or whatever) of them for whatever user, making a very simple 'subset' of the graphs would be easy. Granted, it's a manual step to be taken for each host, but if you come up with a template of graphs you want to see, it should be easy to script the implementation.