Monitor and Alerts

Monitoring your servers and network, whether they run on Linux or Windows, is crucial. Keeping an eye on the performance of your systems allows you to identify and address any issues proactively, even before they impact your users. The use of open-source tools adds an extra layer of security for these companies. When purchasing software, you are required to agree to license terms and conditions, which often grant access rights to your infrastructure and data to a certain extent. This is particularly relevant when utilizing monitoring tools. In contrast, open-source tools eliminate the need to provide access rights to your system to anyone.

Below are some of the best open-source Linux monitoring tools which are available to us.

Nagios Core, a free and open-source monitoring software, offers monitoring services for network, systems, and infrastructure. It also has the capability to monitor custom applications in addition to systems and services. Notifications are sent to users when issues arise and once they are resolved. It includes an optional web interface for users to check the network status, problem history, log files, and more.

Zabbix, another open-source monitoring software, can manage components such as servers, networks, virtual machines, and cloud services. It utilizes various methods for collecting system metrics, including multi-platform Zabbix agents, SNMP and IPMI agents, and end-user web monitoring. Users receive alerts for any issues and can customize alerts based on their roles. These alerts can be delivered via SMS or email when suspicious activity occurs.

Icinga is an open-source network monitoring system that originated as a sub-branch of the Nagios system. It aims to address the limitations of Nagios while introducing new functionalities like a modern Web 2.0 interface, additional database connectors, and a REST API. With Icinga, administrators can easily integrate various extensions into the system without altering the core.

Cacti, on the other hand, is a web-based networking tool serving as the RRDTool's frontend, catering to graph data needs such as network bandwidth usage, CPU utilization, and disk space monitoring. Cacti includes built-in SNMP support and utilizes SNMP or UCD or NET combinations for obtaining device information. Additionally, the tool offers administrators the ability to create different user levels with customized permissions.

Observium is a network monitoring tool distributed under QPL open-source license. It is a low-maintenance tool that provides auto-discovering capacities. Observium offers a threshold alerting features. With this, users are allowed to set and configure threshold and failure states for different entities in the system. It offers a traffic accounting feature that tracks and records the measurements of ports, and the data stored in the tables.

Although we strongly advocate for an enterprise grade firewall for businesses, as it is the primary protection against intrusions and threats, here we introduced the open source Linux based firewalls, mainly for businesses who require a budget focused solution. Should you require any additional assistance, please do not hesitate to reach out to us. Please fill-in the form below and one of our reps will reach out to you soon.