Being a server admin, who hasn’t heard of NAGIOS? The defacto server monitoring tools used by everyone from a home server to the NOC of a datacentre.

It does have problems though:

1. It looks as attractive as … something that’s not very attractive (not that this is important to an outright techie so much ‘management’)
2. It cannot support sub users i.e. users cannot login and see one particular host or service. It’s all or nothing.
3. It is a single location install. What happens if your NAGIOS server goes down or has a network issue?
4. It is a royal pain in the backside to install and configure as it’s all text file based! No matter how much you install things like this, installing NAGIOS is not something you look forward to.

At our hosting company we have had issues in the past with NAGIOS giving out false positives. Naturally as you can imagine, to compound the matter this happens at 3am in the morning at a weekend.

We decided basically to make our own solution. This is where CheckMyBox comes in. Forget you lot, we wanted this for ourselves!

1. No installation required.
2. Remote, geographically seperate monitoring robots that have to ‘agree’ before a notification is sent.
3. Individual host / service / port login.
4. Fully customisable escalation and notification procedures.

We will outline how CheckMyBox works and what it looks like in subsequent posts. Hopefully you are as excited as we are!