Monitoring increasingly complex IT environments can pose quite a challenge. Virtualization and cloud-based applications are finding their way into many IT estates over the world. Keeping a watchful eye out for your infrastructure is now more important than ever, and Opsview allows you to do just that.

The real challenge of performance issues comes from trying to get to the root of the problem. Having a monitoring system set up makes your life, as a system administrator, a lot easier.

With this practical book, you’ll discover how to catch complications in your distributed system before they develop into costly problems. Based on his extensive experience in systems ops at large technology companies, author Slawek Ligus describes an effective data-driven approach for monitoring and alerting that enables you to maintain high availability and deliver a high quality of service.

Written by Ganglia designers and maintainers, this book shows you how to collect and visualize metrics from clusters, grids, and cloud infrastructures at any scale. Want to track CPU utilization from 20,000 hosts every ten seconds? Ganglia is just the tool you need, once you know how its main components work together. This hands-on book helps experienced system administrators take advantage of Ganglia 3.x.

Zenoss Core is an enterprise-level systems and network monitoring solution that can be as complex as you need it to be. And while just about anyone can install it, turn it on, and monitor “something”, Zenoss Core has a complicated interface packed with features. The interface has been drastically improved over version 2, but it’s still not the type of software you can use intuitively – in other words, a bit of guidance is in order.

Zabbix is a very flexible IT monitoring suite, but not every part of it is immediately clear to new users. Following the instructions in this book should allow you to set up monitoring of various metrics on various devices, including Linux and Windows machines, SNMP devices, IPMI enabled server,s and other network attached equipment. You will learn to define conditions – such a temperature being too high or service being down – and act upon them by notifying user by email, SMS, or even restarting service. You will learn to visualize the gathered data with graphs and the various tips and tricks that are provided will help to use Zabbix more efficiently and avoid common pitfalls.