managing servers...

[Les Mikesell]

On Sun, 2005-05-29 at 10:25, bruce wrote:

> as an example, i have 10-15 servers... i'm not an admin, and for the things
> that i'm working on, i don't want to be one... however, i'd still like to
> know that the boxes are corectly setup for the given functions.. right now,
> i don't. as i said, my gut tells me that a combination of the control
> panels/sourcelabs.com with monitoring, and some other functionality would be
> useful...

You need very different approaches for 10-15 servers in a farm all
doing the same operation because you need that to scale up, 10-15
servers each doing different things at the same location, or 10-15
servers all doing multiple functions at different locations.  One
monitoring tool that is straightforward to set up is cacti from
http://www.cacti.net/.  I don't think it does any real-time alerting
but you can graph the CPU, network, and memory usage to watch for
trends that show if you are headed for problems.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell at futuresource.com