Hey everyone! I'm a surveillance IT technician trying to find a monitoring solution for over 80 surveillance servers spread across two cities. My goal is to propose a simple yet effective system to my bosses that can monitor the server's status (whether it's up or down), the status of connected cameras, and the switches.
Currently, we have a mix of older DVRs and newer NVR systems. The DVRs use a basic program called Network Client that shows us their status visually, which is straightforward enough. However, checking the status of the NVRs is a real hassle since I have to log into three random ones daily to see if they're operational. We do receive email notifications about issues, but most of those messages are just noise due to noncritical errors.
I'm looking for a solution that can provide functionality like Network Client, with possible customization for future needs. As it's my first year in IT, I'm eager to learn and implement effective monitoring solutions. Appreciate any advice or product recommendations you can offer!
4 Answers
Check out some chapters from the Site Reliability Engineering book—Monitoring Distributed Systems and Practical Alerting. They’re super helpful! To kick things off, you might consider Grafana Alloy to visualize your data and send it to Grafana Cloud, which is open-source and flexible for later customization.
If you're looking for something simple to start, I suggest trying Uptime Kuma. It’s easy to set up, provides a dashboard view, and allows you to configure email notifications to stay updated on server status.
I personally manage with two tools: Uptime Kuma for knowing when buildings lose WAN connection and Gatus for detailing security camera servers and access control systems. Gatus lets you configure settings through a file, which is pretty handy. Plus, I get notified via Google Chat, so our team stays informed without bombarding our inboxes.
I would recommend Zabbix. It's scalable, so you can start with the basics and expand its functionalities as you grow more comfortable. It might seem complex at first, but it's great for monitoring, especially if you need SNMP data over multiple networks. Just be ready for a bit of setup!
Zabbix might be overkill initially but can be very useful once set up. If you're just after basic up/down data from devices on the same network, there might be simpler solutions like Uptime Kuma that can handle that effectively.