Remote Control for Your Production Site

Have you ever found yourself rushing to the office data center in the middle of the night just because a critical server is down, and you don't have any means to remotely access the server's console or reset the power? How much time and money have you spent on line with data center technicians trying to recover critical pieces of your production infrastructure located at a remote colocation facility?

This post will explain which remote management options are available for you, and how to organize remote management of your critical equipment.

Have a problem managing your tasks? Read this post!

If you are lucky enough to handle all your tasks and requests in time, without a need to manage and prioritize a backlog, then you probably don't need to read the post. If you are a manager and all your direct reports are excellent in managing their task lists and setting by themselves correct tasks priorities then you probably can skip the post too. The rest of you should keep reading.

This is the situation:

• You have a team of bright engineers
• You have many requests coming from different sources: monitoring alerts, customer support tickets, internal change requests, new software releases deployment requests, corporate IT requests (if you still wear the hat), internal requests from different departments like sales, marketing, etc

My monitoring tools set

Now it is time to talk about my set of monitoring tools suitable to monitor medium and large systems.

Nagios monitoring service
I just love it! See my another article for a list of many Nagios plugins suitable to monitor the most of popular services. You can easily write your own plugins, and this is what I did to monitor many application-specific services.

Cacti graphing service
If you  have Nagiosgraph module deployed in your Nagios monitoring system you may think that Cacti is redundant. But it is not, especially when you start to use many available nice Cacti plugins and templates for MySQL, Tomcat, Cisco hardware, disk I/O and others.