Thibaut Barrère / LoGeek

I'm evaluating FiveRuns, a new player in the arena of system monitoring, which offers a 30 days trial. So far I find it's an effective way of monitoring my servers, hence this post.

How it works: just use the wizard to download the agent for your platform, and install it on each machine to monitor. The agent starts pushing data to the FiveRuns hosted server, where it is consolidated and monitored.

Things I liked so far:
- easy to setup, and no server required to handle the monitoring
- cross-platform (I'm currently monitoring 5 windows-based servers, a debian server and an imac)
- good default behaviour, "smart" groups of systems
- easy to configure global thresholds (like: warning and critical level for % CPU or memory or disk)
- history graph for all sensors
- simple but effective notification chain
- automatically detects subsystems to provide more accurate information (mysql and apache already included - I've heard that IIS / SqlServer 2005 support is planned)
- the agent can act as a proxy if some machines in a network do not have access to the internet

Quite often I find that setting up and taking care of a monitoring server can be a burden for small to middle-sized companies (even though you can download a Zenoss or Nagios appliance).

The FiveRuns approach is on a sweet spot here.

(I wasn't even paid to write all this - really)