At Iodynamics, a large part of our business is making sure our customers’ servers and websites (as well as our own) remain operating at peak efficiency. As part of our effort to improve monitoring, we’ve deployed a new monitoring framework based on a program called Nagios.
An open source software product, Nagios continually monitors servers and websites, tracking statistics such as disk space, CPU temperature, cooling fan speeds, program status, and much more. This monitoring technology provides our staff with current information on all the servers and websites we manage.
Such monitoring programs are not new, of course. Iodynamics has had monitoring systems in place for all managed systems for several years. When there is a failure in any of these systems, our personnel are notified by text message and e-mail. However, with the addition of Nagios, we can now take monitoring to a new level of detail.
For example, with a simpler monitoring program, Iodynamics personnel would be notified immediately if a server went down, but diagnosing the outage would likely involve a visit to the server. With the increased monitoring power of Nagios, Iodynamics can spot a critical problem, like an overheating CPU, before end users even know anything's wrong. So, instead of vising the downed server to see what the problem is, our personnel can visit the server with a new CPU fan before the server ever fails. In other words, Nagios allows us to concentrate more on preventative maintenance instead of costly outages and repairs.
For more information about Iodynamics server management programs, contact Thom Bowers at thom@iodynamics.com or at 801.433-2664 ext 511.