Tools for Monitoring Multiple Unix Based Systems [closed]

nagios ! i've never used it with OSX, but quick googling shows that there are nrpe plugins for it.

i use nagios in environment with ~80 linux and windows servers, but there are deployments for thousands of servers as well.

for trend tracking - munin mentioned here as well - is very nice tool as well. you can feed critical readings from munin back to nagios.

ps. choice of tool heavily depends on definition of realtime. if 2 minute lag from event occuring to notification being sent over sms / e-mail is ok. at least older versions of nagios which did not allowed more frequent checks then once per minute.

Zenoss does everything you want out of the box and can work over either SSH or SNMP. I've also previously used Zabbix as a full on monitoring system, and previous to that Cacti for trends and Nagios for alerting.

All of these are free, and some are more integrated than others. Zenoss has the benefit of tying together a lot of things out of the box, and the option of enterprise level support. Being based on Zope, it's a little more resource intensive to run than the others, but very easy to hack on if you know Python.

You should give all of these a trial run and see which one fits your use case the best.

I use Munin, myself. It's like nagiosMRTG, but I liked it better back when I evaluated them both. I forget why.

Nagios is free, popular and open source. There are a lot of monitoring plugins availble (for different devices and services). Unless you use a separate GUI, configuration is by text file. It sends alerts notification e-mails, which is how my organisation traps and responds to system problems (alerts into a ticket system).

There are various methods for collecting information from machines being monitored. Whichever monitoring solution you choose, I recommend collecting information from each system directly by SNMP. If you're unfamiliar, it'll take a small bit of learning. In the end however, it's the standard solution that Just Works.

Symon is a very light software that fit your description. A server can be used to monitor several computers and it comes with a php script to draw some graphics. I'm sure it could be adapted to Os-X with only a few changes.

If you need something a little bit more exhaustive, you could try zabbix.