3 simple questions regarding the use of server monitoring

[feron]

Hi everyone,

for my bachelor thesis I'm working on a mobile frontend for a server monitoring system. If you're working with (or have worked with) a server monitoring system, I would really appreciate it if you could answer some questions for me

How (and how often) do you interact with the server monitoring system? (Push, email, app, web, console, ...)

During your interaction with the system, what works good for you and how could the interaction be improved?

How many people are using the server monitoring system? If more than one, how does communication work?

Thanks for tanking the time

Cheers,
Mike

 

[Firewire2002]

Your questions are very superficially.

How (and how often) do you interact with the server monitoring system? (Push, email, app, web, console, ...)

How? web frontend for administration, email/sms/RocketChat/wallboard for notification
How often? It's a permanent task for the whole business day (or longer in case of on call duty).

During your interaction with the system, what works good for you and how could the interaction be improved?

It depends of which monitoring system you are talking about. Nagios/Icinga/CheckMK usage is horrible. Zabbix is nice.

How many people are using the server monitoring system? If more than one, how does communication work?

250 people. Which communication do you mean?

 

[feron]

Hey Firewire2002, thanks for taking the time to answer
It sound's like server monitoring is your main job?

It depends of which monitoring system you are talking about. Nagios/Icinga/CheckMK usage is horrible. Zabbix is nice.

In what way is Zabbix nicer to work with? Is it about the frontend you're using, or about the hole setup process, features etc.?

250 people. Which communication do you mean?

If so many people are using the same system, how do you know who works on what?
Do you sometimes work together with others on the same problem, and if you do, how do you interact with them to exchange information?

 

[Firewire2002]

Monitoring is not my main job but one of many. Monitoring attends all tasks of a system administrator.

I prefer Zabbix because it's easier to handle in multiuser environments. Other tools use often configuration files and they don't scale up very nice with the user count. Because the risk to edit the same file by 2 users at the same time grows up. Zabbix has also much features which are missing in the other tools.

Real toys for admins are only interesting if they are large. Each admin know monitoring systems which are used only for 10 servers but they are boring. It's a other feeling if there are 10000 or 50000 servers configured.
So of course our 250 users don't monitor the same group of servers. Each department has it's own subset of hosts, checks, and so on. Some departments monitor their own servers, some the servers of customers and one department monitor our door states (open/closed) or the temperature of air conditioning.

So communication inside the single teams depends on the size of the team. Smaller teams share the same room so they could talk to eachother. Larger teams use a ticketsystem. Each alert is a ticket and each user take the next ticket in queue.

 

[feron]

Thanks so much for answering, you've helped me quite a lot