Several months back, we were ‘caught with our pants down.’ One of our critical servers had crashed overnight and we did not receive any sort of notification from the data center. The server included “monitored services” yet somehow even the data center wasn’t aware that our server was unreachable. I highly encourage every systems administrator to take the time this week and ensure that their uptime monitoring system is functioning. If your business is like ours, you can not afford even a second of downtime.
Simple test: Find out the IP address(s) associated with your data center or third party monitoring systems uptime server and block it using iptables or your firewall software. If you receive a notification, great! If not, it’s time to find a new solution!
In our case, the data center’s Nagios system was in fact monitoring the server, but a full mail queue kept it from dispatching email and SMS alerts. Understandable … but totally inexcusable.
Enter Panopta!
I knew that something had to give. If you perform a quick Google search yourself, you’ll find that there are dozens upon dozens of vendors that offer this service. Assess your needs and prioritize what you’re in need of.
In our case, we needed a large number of service checks, SMS alerts, handy reporting features, and an easy to reach development team. Panopta offered us everything that we were in need, at an affordable price.
Panopta monitors your servers and provides you with the tolls you need to minimize the impact of outages to your online business. Panopta provides:
- Network service and server resource monitoring with checks every 60 seconds.
- Global monitoring network with 15 locations in North America, Europe and Asia.
- Intelligent notification with automatic team-based escalation.
- Email, phone and SMS notifications
- Management interface designed to scale to large numbers of servers.
- Setup wizard for automatic detection of services to be monitored.
- Mobile interface with iPhone support for responding to outages remotely.
My favorite part of Panopta has to be what they call “Intelligent notifications.“ Back when our data center monitored our servers, they would shoot me a text message when there was a problem with the server. Because I keep my Blackberry next to my bed at night, it’s wasn’t unusual for me to receive a text alert at 3:30 in the morning alerting me of such problems! We employ a 24 hour help desk, so why should I be pulled from my sleep when there is an office full of folks that could just as easily restart Apache as I could?
With Panopta’s Intelligent Notifications, I’m no longer the first person to receive SMS alerts of outages during the overnight hours. Now, they immediately get pushed to our support team. If after a certain period of time the service, Apache for example, is still unavailable, Panopta will go down the line and send the SMS to the data center technician on-call. Finally, if Apache is still down after an alert has been dispatched to the data center technician, I’ll receive a SMS alert to my Blackberry. Today, my phone rarely goes off in the middle of the night as a result of a server meltdown. 
Tomorrow, I’ll take you through a tour of the Panopta Control Panel.
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ReadyWire Multimedia Solutionsis an Authorized Reseller of Panopta, the Advanced Server Monitoring and Outage Management Service. Through our partnerships with Panopta, we are proud to be able to bring our customers the service far below the usual retail price.
To get started with Panopta, click here.
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