Infrastructure Monitoring for Helpdesk/Sys Admin team.
Posted by Head-Web-404@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 17 comments
What do you think about a Monitoring wall for Sys/Network monitoring ?
I’m thinking about deploying one, mainly to monitor :
Online services : Microsoft, and others external apps outages
Network : ISP links,
Infrastructure : Servers Online/Offline
Ticketing systems : KPIs
What App would you recommend for doing this?
Icolan@reddit
What is the purpose of a wall of monitors displaying statistics? Wouldn't it just be better to alert on actionable items instead of relying on someone looking at a wall of screens and hopefully seeing something?
Far_Gift6173@reddit
It's kinda soothing and looks good for the manager
chickibumbum_byomde@reddit
A monitoring wall can be useful, but only if it shows clear, actionable status, not just a wall of metrics.
The mistake many teams make is putting too much on it, and it turns into background noise that nobody really looks at. The goal should be a simple “what’s broken right now” view across services, network, and infrastructure. for that, you want something that can aggregate everything into one place and present it cleanly. using checkmk atm, built some fancy mgmt level dashboards for the wall while still having detailed views for engineers when needed.
In the end, it’s less about the screen and more about making sure the information on it is actually useful at a glance.
SudoZenWizz@reddit
we have something similar on a big TV in the office, we have all required monitroing for us and all our customers done with checkmk and have dedicated dashboards based on what is needed.
We monitor all network devices in our infra and client infra, all servers and virtualization, cloud integration and all needed processes and services, certificates, etc.
We are both clients and partners for checkmk and found it the easiest way to monitor huge area of services and apps in a centralized location.
ukulele87@reddit
Great project for points with management and people who dont know better.
Its practically useless, you should already have monitoring in place, if alerting its correctly configured thats all you need to know.
Watching multiple graphs all day long only servers to bamboozle people who dont have an idea about IT, might as well put a few monitors with top or some realtime gibberish in green text over a black background for the same effect.
DisastrousRutabaga15@reddit
there are many out there. Manage Engine, Zoho, Atera which i found good. let me know if you need any help with those tools
barrulus@reddit
Honestly the best use for a video wall is sales and marketing.
If your sales/exec team likes to parade customers around the premises it is a powerful comfort tool.
Not a single person in the NOC will ever look at them.
tin-naga@reddit
I’d love to have one. I started CheckMK but onboarding is time consuming for certain configs in the free version.
DailonMarkMann@reddit
we have a WUG map on a 55 inch TV. It works really well, and executives think it is really cool. A total win/win.
PsychologicalHat3292@reddit
Waste of time. Source: did it. 8 55" monitors showing the exact same things you stated. None of it was helpful nor insightful.
Set your monitoring system up to alert you for actionable items and none of the other fluff. You could do all of this with one single system, do your research. Find a solution that fits your needs/budget. Build a dashboard for your KPI's, nobody is reading it on a monitor wall.
I've built these systems with SumoLogic, Grafana, Zabbix, PRTG and probably more that I forget.
Head-Web-404@reddit (OP)
Thank you for sharing your experience 🙏
VA_Network_Nerd@reddit
It's a time and money pit that nobody will ever be truly happy with.
Your time is better spent focusing on how to make text or e-mail notifications more meaningful & helpful.
Head-Web-404@reddit (OP)
I think about having realtime visuals alerts. If a customer is complaining about internet issues, a quick look at the wall can tell if his link is up or down…
VA_Network_Nerd@reddit
Yep. It sounds so easy.
But someone will always want it just a little bit different.
Can you change the color?
Can you make it include packets per second?
Why isn't CPU utilization up there too?
Man those colors just don't look right from my desk. I can't see them. Can you change them again?
IMO: Triggering an e-mail notification that a critical ISP circuit has been running higher than 90% for more than 5 minutes (feel free to quibble over the specific values) is more useful.
RainStormLou@reddit
I use prtg for a visual graph wan links. we have weather on the right hand side. I used to have server activity on the right hand side, but I never looked at it so we replaced it with weather.
GullibleDetective@reddit
What did your searches turn up? there's a dozen tools for each of these and they have been posted about weekly.
Head-Web-404@reddit (OP)
Checkmk, Prometheus+Grafana, Zabbix…
There are too much, and testing each of them requires some time that I don’t have…