VMware Cloud Community
jptechnical
Contributor
Contributor

Noob question, monitor remote network without vpn

I am evaluating several monitoring products for my business. I am a small repair shop looking to offer some basic monitoring to my clients. I am trying to stick with FOSS, most of my clients are non-profit and they don't have very deep pockets. I am not interested in bending Spiceworks to my will (aside from the fact that it hurts my eyes and steals countless hours from my life waiting for it to do something useful). I run a blend of Windows and Linux (Ubuntu LTS) servers (physical and virtual with VMWare ESXi and legacy Server 1/2) and XP desktops (with a few Win7 and even fewer Vista).

Anyway, I would have an HQ server on my network, opening the necessary ports for secure and insecure agents to communicate with it. I would install several agents on the servers and workstations in the remote networks. There would be no open ports into their network, all reporting would need to go OUT of their network and IN to mine. Mainly I want to monitor windows services, hardware profiles (including Dell service tag if possible but not required) such as disk, optical drive, ram, os version, patch level (service pack will suffice) and possibly AV status.

Is Hyperic a suitable choice? I see some really great reviews, and I like the fact that it is agent based, and not snmp/wmi based, which is not so great on a small p2p network. Any input on this would be much appreciated. Even if it is that Hyperic will not do it and what would be a better choice given what I outlined above. I am impressed with the caliber of the posts and threads in this forum, it seems to be a more 'mature' group, not hobbyist driven. I hope you can help.

JP
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admin
Immortal
Immortal

Hi,

Yes HQ can do what you want. However, the feature is only available in the Commerical/Enterprise Edition. It is called unidirectional agents

Basically the Community Edition only uses bidirectional communication between HQ server and HQ agents. The server establishes a connection to an agent to send it updates. The agent also establishes a connection to the server to send in the collected data.

In unidirectional mode the agents open a connection to the HQ server and the server will use connection as a 2 way transport to send updates to the agent.

One of the nice things about HQ is that if there isn't a plugin to do what you need it is *usually* pretty simple to write your own plugins to fill in the gaps.
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someniceuser
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

By any chance would you have this plugin?

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