Typically just as I was thinking of leaving Ron turned up, Ron and I
have a mutual interest in all things 'Database' especially SugarCRM,
ACT and so forth, but low did Ron have something far more interesting
on his Laptop! The swine is running Nagios http://www.nagios.org/ I've
tried three times to get a fully functional version running and
failed. Installing is easy, getting it to, well, run is easy getting
it to actually do something can be pretty painful its all about
configuration files, as Ron said if you can get one to work your
laughing.

Ron appeared to be monitoring three quarters of the UK with his set up
we all huddled round in a semi circle while he took us on a whirl wind
ride round the West Midlands from server to server, firewalls, routers
and and mysql machines.
</snip>

Nagios is a pig to get running right.

I've got it on a freebsd box working fine at the moment :) Once i'd installed the ping plugin was buggered and it kept generating errors . After finding a suitable replacement (i forget which one now) and modifying the configs suitably it works :)

I tend to just use a custom webpage with some ajax and php magic that a mate knocked up that is pretty simple to use and you can just define which ports each service you want to check runs on. Obviously not as extensive as Nagios. SNMP monitoring using Cacti is also fun.

Regards,
Joe