Server Monitoring

Working as a System Administrator always means you have to keep your systems up and running. If a system or service goes down, you usually want to know it before any of your customers notices. This is where Server Monitoring comes in. There are a bunch of services that provide server monitoring services on the net, either for free or for a small fee, but the usability and the number of configuration settings however are often unsatisfactory.

Free desktop monitoring software is rare and commercial products are likely to be very expensive. As a matter of fact, my server was under some heavy attack recently, and I would have been grateful if I'd had some desktop software for monitoring my server. In the meantime, I wrote myself a very simple tool telling me if my server is responding to ICMP echo requests - also known as ping.

My server is now back up and running without any loss of data. I began writing a monitoring software in C# 3.0 (C# 3.0 is supported by Mono 2.0) to keep track of my server and the services running on it. In the current pre-alpha state my tool is highly customizable to specific user requirements. An included small web server (http://www.codeplex.com/webserver) will supply XML-data to web services, making it easy to build a web interface.