# Looking for decent server monitoring solution



## pentago (May 8, 2016)

While researching I noticed that people generally suggest Nagios,  Munin and Monit but I didn't personally tried any yet. 

I'd like to  hear suggestions on which solution people tend to use and recommend for FreeBSD the most. 

Also, does  any solution offer info on ZFS and Jails?


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## gkontos (May 8, 2016)

I usually combine sysutils/munin-node and net-mgmt/zabbix2-agent. The first one has some nice ZFS plugins also.


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## SirDice (May 9, 2016)

I have some basic ZFS LLD scripts for Zabbix if you're interested. They'll detect Zpools and ZFS filesystems dynamically.


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## Aitor Bostetxea (May 9, 2016)

I'd go for Pandora FMS. They are compatible with FreeBSD, plus their server monitoring capabilities are the best I've seen so far.


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## pentago (May 12, 2016)

What I saw during research is that all boils down to Nagios and Zabbix and plenty of people turning FROM Nagios TO Zabbix.
I think I'll try Zabbix after playing with Munin.


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## pentago (May 12, 2016)

Also, does any of these supports PF and maybe Jails stats?


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## SirDice (May 12, 2016)

With Zabbix you can create templates, with those templates you can monitor anything you want. You just need to create a good template that accesses a couple of custom userParameters. These userParameters can call scripts (shell, Perl, Ruby, whatever you like to use) and provide the information. If you're really clever you can make use of Zabbix' LLD (Low Level Discovery) and it'll add/monitor jails for example dynamically.


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## pentago (May 12, 2016)

SirDice said:


> With Zabbix you can create templates, with those templates you can monitor anything you want. You just need to create a good template that accesses a couple of custom userParameters. These userParameters can call scripts (shell, Perl, Ruby, whatever you like to use) and provide the information. If you're really clever you can make use of Zabbix' LLD (Low Level Discovery) and it'll add/monitor jails for example dynamically.



Great, sounds awesome. Will check it out. Thanks!


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## lme@ (May 12, 2016)

Don't go for Nagios or Zabbix, give net-mgmt/icinga2 a try first.


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## wblock@ (May 13, 2016)

I've been using Icinga2 for quite a while, thanks to lme@'s port.  It is pretty much a rewrite of Nagios.  Unlike the others, it does not need PHP.  Unless you want the Icingaweb thing, anyway.


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## rudelgurke (May 17, 2016)

lme@ said:


> Don't go for Nagios or Zabbix, give net-mgmt/icinga2 a try first.



I also recommend it. And net-mgmt/cricket or net-mgmt/cacti


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## logan893 (Jun 27, 2016)

I've been thinking about this for the past couple of days, and luckily I stumbled upon this discussion.

Having multiple FreeBSD servers running in VMs, I've been wanting for a unified monitoring interface (and perhaps combined with a syslog). My setup consists of ESXi hosting multiple VMs, which are mainly narrow-purpose FreeBSD servers or FreeBSD based distributions (FreeNAS, pfSense), and also the odd VM running Linux (Ubuntu) or Windows.

Which of these systems will, either out of the box or with simple add-on scripting, be sufficient to replace also the monitoring information received from the periodic daily/weekly e-mails?

Are there notable differences in interoperability/features (again, either out of the box or with add-ons) with FreeBSD based appliances such as FreeNAS and pfSense, and also non-FreeBSD systems such as various flavors of Linux, ESXi, and Windows?

And finally, do any of them, in your collective experience, have mobile friendly (and useful) versions of their interfaces (web/app)?


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## SirDice (Jun 27, 2016)

With VMWare you may want to checkout Zabbix: https://www.zabbix.com/documentation/2.4/manual/vm_monitoring

It can automatically discover VMs and add them to the monitoring. Zabbix's LLD is really powerful in this respect.


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## logan893 (Jun 29, 2016)

I've given Zabbix a go. It's simple enough to get started, although encrypted agent communication (using PSK) does not yet seem to be working in the version available from ports (3.0.2), and the server keeps crashing (segmentation fault).

The automatic discovery of VMware Hypervisor and its guest VMs is too limiting. It's not possible to combine these read-only auto-created entries with already existing, or new, hosts. And thus, I am unable to assign proper templates to these auto-created hosts. That means I'm either stuck with two copies of each VM host, or I'll have to live without either the FreeBSD template or the VMware Guest template.
https://support.zabbix.com/browse/ZBXNEXT-2088

Also I've already run into what I consider crippling limitations with how data is displayed. Perhaps it's not useful for everyone to display multiple stats for multiple hosts as graphs over time all at once, but I've already seen support tickets on the matter, with less than adequate implementations for my liking.
https://support.zabbix.com/browse/ZBXNEXT-570

Does Icinga2 have better overview / graphing support?
Next may be to try Icinga2, time permitting.


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## phoenix (Jun 29, 2016)

LibreNMS and Nagios are also quite nice.  These are what we're using at work to monitor our Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD servers, along with all our wireless PtP gear, switches, and other networking infrastructure.

Nagios does the service monitoring (is X running, is Y accessible, does ping respond, etc), while LibreNMS monitors all the resources (CPU/RAM/disk/network usage, temps, etc).


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