Hardware monitoring recommendations?

[steagle]

Does anyone have recommendations for Mac OS-friendly hardware monitoring solutions? Whether they be custom scripts or tools within Jamf (preferred) or a 3rd party platform. I would like to be able to get alerts on common hardware and software issues such as:

• Hard drive capacity
• Fan status
• CPU/mobo temps
• Other critical hardware issues such as bad memory, bad HD sectors, etc.
• Application load time
• Application crash data

I know Lithium was a great tool back in the day but I haven't seen much on this front in recent years. We currently use Zenoss Core for monitoring our server infrastructure, but it doesn't scale well to desktop compute. Any recommendations would be most appreciated, thanks!

[Taylor_Armstron]

Casper itself will take care of at least the 1st one..... that's built-in.

I'd probably try to parse some GeekTool scripts for some of the others - if you can find how GeekTool is extracting the data, I'd consider writing some of that into scripts or EA's for JAMF. That being said - anything done via an EA or Jamf script isn't going to be "real time"

[ifbell]

Have you looked into Nagios?

[steagle]

@Taylor.Armstrong - Right, but as you mentioned, there's no real-time functionality, and you have to look at each system individually. Unless there is a tool built into Jamf I'm missing that can show me all hard drive statuses on all computers at once? Running manual reports is not the way I'm looking to do this, I prefer actual monitoring.

@ifbell - I've heard of Nagios, but have not looked into it up to this point. On quick review it looks quite similar to Zenoss. Pretty comprehensive. Does Nagios integrate with Jamf in any way - for instance, pulling existing computer records into its own database? Or does it have a way to scan networks to detect and auto-add compatible systems? Setting up every individual user system manually is not something I would look forward to doing, unless there is truly no other way.

[steagle]

So I'm running the online demo of Nagios XI and it is extremely similar to Zenoss; that is, it is geared more towards infrastructure monitoring and less so towards desktop compute. For instance, I don't really need to know if a user system is "down" or not. I basically want what Lithium 5 had for the Mac environment, a tool for preventative maintenance of our desktop systems, without all of the additional layers of complexity that infrastructure monitoring platforms like this introduce. Any other suggestions?

[bvrooman · Accepted solution]

Watchman?

[Nix4Life]

@steagle I was able to setup the following a couple years ago for a client. We used Nagios with the factor.pkg from puppet. I was able to get a lot of information. it also made it quick and easy for custom "checks"

[Chris_Hafner]

We're using NagiosXI (Regular old Nagios would work as well) to monitor our server fleet (Including our three Mac jamf servers). It took a little figuring out but it works well and it's live. I am still fighting with memory usage. The issue here is that the macOS REALLY likes to use all of its memory and reassigns memory rather efficiently. The Nagios agent doesn't seem to understand that and reports against all fo the memory being used. I haven't taught it to respect Apples "Memory Pressure" metric yet.

[steagle]

@bvrooman - perfect, just what I was looking for! And two-way integration with Jamf. Sold :)

[steagle]

@Chris_Hafner Thanks for the feedback. Nagios definitely looks super powerful, but after playing with the trial of Watchman, I have to say I'm pretty much sold on that product. It captures the kind of metrics I'm looking for and is clearly designed with the Apple aesthetic in mind. Hope I get the budget to integrate it.

[Chris_Hafner]

@steagle I completely concur! For us, it was a budgetary thing. Not that it's too expensive, it's that we already had Nagios XI in the works. That said, I'd love to hear how watchman is going for those that are using it and what you like about it. We're also a ZenDesk shop so...

[steagle]

I've been using the Watchman trial for the past two days and I love it. It's definitely designed by people who appreciate aesthetics... everything is laid out very intelligently and the overall presentation is very polished. It isn't overwhelming you with data you don't really need, or data that is hard to visually analyze quickly. It is actually quite a bit like Jamf in its functionality. Similar approach in the enrollment process, and of course the monitoring agent can be packaged and deployed via a Jamf policy. I'm currently setting up its extension attributes to integrate in Jamf, which will allow various computer statuses to display within Jamf's views. All in all, it seems like the perfect tool for us. We're also a Zendesk shop so I'm going to look into that integration as well.

[markanderson]

LITHIUM Network Monitoring Platform is an integrated and feature rich network, server and appliance monitoring and management platform. Designed to provide an end-to-end Mac OS X solution, Lithium includes automated device monitoring, out-of-the-box support for SNMP and an integrated trouble-ticket case management system.

The platform is built around a scalable, modular architecture that incorporates a Mac OS X server-side component (Core) to perform automated device monitoring, data collection, analysis and storage and to manage the multi-user case management system.

The Mac OS X client (Console) provides the user with a graphically rich and interactive monitoring and management console that delivers integration and efficient work-flow beyond the capabilities of web-based applications alone.