We are an IT consultancy company and have servers and machines located across many different customer's sites, all behind NAT, there being a single external IP address for the whole site, which may have several servers.
Whilst Nagios seems to be the preferred monitoring solution, it (and many other competitors to Zabbix) can't handle situations where machines don't have Internet routable IP addresses. Many products make a big thing of being 'agentless' but in my opinion this is a disadvantage - I've got a long list of software I've looked into recently and dismissed, mostly because they won't cope with our NAT'ing.
We've now got one machine in our office, with a single port forward from the outside world, with thirty or so machines reporting back every minute or two using active only checks. If anything starts misbehaving we can log in remotely or dispatch staff accordingly and resolve the problem immediately.
Since I've discovered that you can run user-defined programs from zabbix_agentd I've been hastily coding up some extensions to monitor our entire infrastructure - Leased line routers etc. I'm just about to post these into the Cookbook forum if you're interested.
In short, Zabbix is brilliant!
Whilst Nagios seems to be the preferred monitoring solution, it (and many other competitors to Zabbix) can't handle situations where machines don't have Internet routable IP addresses. Many products make a big thing of being 'agentless' but in my opinion this is a disadvantage - I've got a long list of software I've looked into recently and dismissed, mostly because they won't cope with our NAT'ing.
We've now got one machine in our office, with a single port forward from the outside world, with thirty or so machines reporting back every minute or two using active only checks. If anything starts misbehaving we can log in remotely or dispatch staff accordingly and resolve the problem immediately.
Since I've discovered that you can run user-defined programs from zabbix_agentd I've been hastily coding up some extensions to monitor our entire infrastructure - Leased line routers etc. I'm just about to post these into the Cookbook forum if you're interested.
In short, Zabbix is brilliant!