I manage several devices—including UPS units, KVMs, and alarm systems—that send notifications by email. I'd like to consolidate those alerts into one place, preferably with a dashboard, filtering, and rules so that only important events create tickets or wake someone up. What monitoring or alert-management tools have worked well for this kind of setup, especially when some older devices can only send email?
4 Answers
Zabbix and PRTG are both solid options. PRTG is generally quick to get running, while Zabbix is free and open source with a lot of flexibility. Zabbix takes more time to learn, but it can handle monitoring, alert rules, dashboards, and escalation without the licensing costs that can become painful with larger sensor counts.
A help-desk integration is another option: have alerts create tickets automatically, then add rules so only meaningful events open a ticket. For example, a brief UPS transfer to battery could be logged or ignored, while a shutdown warning or prolonged battery condition could create an incident.
For older hardware that can only send mail, routing the messages into dedicated channels in a chat system can work well. You get mobile notifications and can mute noisy sources, although this is better for visibility than for tracking the actual root cause or outage state.
The downside is that a busy channel can make it difficult to tell what is still failing. A proper monitoring system is better if you need correlation, deduplication, or state tracking.
If the devices only send email, an alert-management service such as PagerDuty or AlertOps can provide a unique inbound address for each service and handle routing and escalation. They’re polished, but the cost may be higher than an open-source solution.
Keep in mind that some remote devices, such as older UPS units, may not support an agent. In those cases, you’ll want to use SNMP, IPMI, or email-based triggers instead.