Once upon a time, I used to not care about the health of my servers. And while some still suffer in relative silence, for the most part I have changed course on the matter, and there’s just no excuse NOT to monitor things up the wazoo, just in case.

But, monitoring can be complex. There are services out there that’ll do it for you, Open source software packages and commercial solutions alike. But, all of that is TOO MUCH EFFORT for the lazy admin. Nagios, for example, is powerful and flexible. But it takes time to get comfortable with it. And a commercial solution based on nagios, groundworks, which is meant to make things easy, is downright bloated and clunky to work with.

Read the full thing at http://qdork.com/2010/12/system-monitoring-for-the-lazy-admin-part-1/