By Scott Lowe, Special to ZDNet Asia
Thursday, December 18, 2008 12:24 PM
There are free, as well as paid, virtual appliances available to meet most needs, which are easy to set up and helps you avoid the hassle of installing a system on your own. Whenever it makes sense, I like to let other people do my work for me. Case in point: Our old MRTG-based network monitoring system has fallen into a woeful state at Westminster College. It's still monitoring, but needs a whole lot of attention to be truly useful again. I love MRTG (multi-router traffic grapher) and its pretty graphs. However, when I started to look at the amount of work that would be required to really bring our MRTG monitoring system back from the abyss, I cringed a bit. So, being the typical IT guy, I turned to Google for a solution. Over the years, I've installed and played with just about every open source network and server monitoring system out there and, after looking around a bit last week, decided that Cacti would be a reasonable replacement for our existing MRTG-only system. Cacti provides an easier administrative experience than a bare bones MRTG installation. However, I really didn't want to go through building the whole setup on either Linux or Windows. Read more » |
