It’s been a little while since my last post! The months have gone by super fast, at work we've accomplished some great things and we haven’t had much alerts coming from the monitoring box. There is so much to do in the I.T. department here, it seemed like we'd never be done with the things we wanted to get accomplished. The last couple of months, I realize we are really picking up the pace and these goals seem more feasible at this point. Our I.T. Manager has introduced daily stand-up meetings which have helped create communication between I.T. personnel. We are now using many of the tools I setup for my personal use when I started, for managing and organizing tasks. Here are a couple of my favorite free Open Source Sysadmin Tools:
ELOG
I love ELOG! Basically it's a Web based Logbook written in Perl. It's completely customizable with a single configuration file. For example I have logbooks for each of our co-location facilities organized by City. I then have simple categories and tags to organize the log entries. Each log entry is stored as a simple text file, no database used so archiving is simple.
Every one of our techs now uses this tool for most of the changes they make while not at work or while responding to Alerts. It's already proved to be an indispensable tool to everyone in the company including the developers because they can check to see what updates/patches we have applied to certain machines and their respected times.
When your company has servers located throughout the State and or Nation, it’s hard to keep track of what servers are where. Specifically, where in the Rack they may be located. In the case of involving “Remote Hands” support, you want to be able to relay accurate information quickly. In our company we have a an I.T. Team of 6 people who regularly visit our collocation facilities. In any event servers can be given different IP’s, changed, renamed, or in some cases moved altogether. This is where Rack Tables saves the day(assuming your team uses it)!
Spiceworks is an invaluable free tool that let’s you do many things! It includes the following: Monitoring, Network Inventory, Asset Management, Software Auditing, Help Desk, Network Mapping, DNS Troubleshooting, Power Consumption monitors, and more, for FREE! We use the Help Desk primarily for our employees to submit tickets for I.T. requests. This tool is great for small businesses who need a little more information and control of their network. It also has some tools to help larger networks as well, for instance, the Help Desk is a great full featured and customizable Ticket Request and Management platform.
Known for it’s simplicity and dependability, Cacti offers an efficient and effective free graphing solution for all sizes of networks. With Virtual box and VMware images of pre-configured Cacti solutions, and howto’s for every OS you can think of, you shouldn’t have a problem getting Cacti up a running. Using RRDTool you get nice pretty graphs that are very easy to read and dig into. There are backup options, and the ability to create Guest users that can only view particular graphs, which is great for over seas support or remote information.
The tools I’ve listed here could quite possibly manage a decent sized network. All these tools are FREE and offer extensive customization and control to help you maintain I.T. operations efficiently with minimal cost. There are certainly more tools out there that do similar functions, but these are my favorites that have proved their worth.
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