All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
What do you expect from a server monitoring service ?
Hello LowEndTalk members,
I am exploring ideas with the intent of starting a company and I came up with the idea a creating a server monitoring service. My plan is to do something more complete then a ping based monitoring service, less hassling than setting up your own service (cacti, munin, …) and customer oriented.
If you want to help me in this big adventure, please take a few minutes to answers to the few questions below.
Here are the questions, please answer them realistically:
1) Do you own servers as a hobbyist or as a professional?
2) How many servers do you have?
3) What frequency of check are you expecting?
4) For how long will you need the data (data retention)?
5) What kind of metrics do you need? (CPU load, RAM usage, …)
6) What kind of notifications would be useful according to you? (email, sms, …)
7) Do you think that a mobile website would be useful?
8) Do you have ideas of plans? (Features/Prices. Keep in mind that we will have to pay wages, bills, …)
9) Do you need custom metrics? Are you ready to code to have them?
10) Do you know or use monitoring services? What can make you use ours instead?
11) What are the features that you dream about when server monitoring service comes to you mind?
I am also open to advice, warnings or ideas.
Thank you for reading me.
Edouard
Comments
Hi
sorry you have not had much feedback to this.
here are my 2 cents:
1) Do you own servers as a hobbyist or as a professional?
both
2) How many servers do you have?
plenty
3) What frequency of check are you expecting?
every 5 minutes
4) For how long will you need the data (data retention)?
I think 6 months is ideal
5) What kind of metrics do you need? (CPU load, RAM usage, …)
cpu,ram, disk, smtp outbound connections, etc etc
6) What kind of notifications would be useful according to you? (email, sms, …)
email and sms is ideal
7) Do you think that a mobile website would be useful?
indeed
8) Do you have ideas of plans? (Features/Prices. Keep in mind that we will have to pay wages, bills, …)
I think I you keep cost down at the start that will help with getting the usage up.
9) Do you need custom metrics? Are you ready to code to have them?
make it an option
10) Do you know or use monitoring services? What can make you use ours instead?
I use PRTG and VPSMON
11) What are the features that you dream about when server monitoring service comes to you mind?
PRTG and VPSMON combined
hope this helps
Hobbyist
11
Every 2-3 minutes?
5 days
CPU load, RAM, Uptime, and HD
SMS
Yes, especially an iPhone or Android app
Nope....
Not that i'm aware
Currently I use BlueVM's (http://servers.spencer.pw/) for public stuff and StatusCake for notifactions
An iPhone app would be beyond lovely. A nice design is also a plus.
Both but mostly making my own service
21
1 minute
full data resaloution for 1-3 months. and some nice averages for upto a year after that if u can make that information useful then give it to me otherwise let me export it into some sort of excel graphs.
Pick metrics that allow for debuging basic issues from the OS. and also find what ur nitch is going to be.
the more options the better. if things like bush notifications are integrated makes it more usable. Also if you email static graphs
look to my answer above. i have an ssh client on my phone. there are some things where if one of many web servers has high load i dont care if it falls over. but if my database server is having issues i wanna be able to debug
if you want to know this PM me.
Custom metrics are only useful for higher end companies a or in the way that they are willing to do the effort. Most people will send an email telling you they want you to had a metric for graphing the temperature of a dedicated server. If you put it in great if u dont they are probably not going to
Observoum (free)
New relic (paid)
Depends on what your scope of ur project make sure to find something ur monitoring is good at instead of trying to make it everything day one.
Trends and comparasons. Want the server to be learning about my usage know be able to tell me that i have high load on Saturday not just show me I have high load. I wanna be able to tag servers and if two servers have the same tags like they are both web servers running the same code. But one always has higher load then the other it should be able to tell me that maybe something is misconfigured on the machine or something.
If you want more please PM me we can skype this or something like that. I can give u some info one what i have learned over the last year of developing one.