we're an ISV about to deploy our SaaS application over the internet to our end users, and are currently looking for an application monitoring solution. In addition to monitoring the usual OS-level suspects (I/O, disk space, logs, CPU, RAM, swapping, etc.), we're also looking to monitor, alert and report on internal application events, conditions, and counters (think queue size for internal service, or latency of a service we're getting from a third party via custom APIs).
We're started looking at Nagios, Zenoss, etc., but found out those do only low-level stuff, and are currently looking at MOM and ManageEngine. Still, they are far from being an custom app monitoring tool.
So – do you have anything to suggest?
Best Answer
A couple possibilities:
Most monitoring systems - from Nagios to Zenoss to HP OpenView - allow you to write custom monitors, which may be what you want.
You could write a simpler monitor but make it more monitoring-system-agnostic by exporting it using the customization features of (linux) net-snmpd. These let you export whatever random numbers or strings you want out over snmp; all you have to do is write the small script to fetch the numbers themselves from your app. This could be from log files or a status file that your app writes out periodically or whatever.