Access as an application vendor from outside a firewall

[Michael Arney]

I have been tasked by my company to compare system monitoring tools.  We are a small Java software development shop.  Our product runs on several servers (Windows or Unix) at each of our clients, and has a web front end, file system storage, and database (PostgreSQL, Oracle, or MS SQL Server).  We support our software remotely: the clients agree to provide VPN or Telnet access.  The VPN access may not be permanent (ie we may have to use a Cisco or Juniper vpn client each time we remote desktop to them).  At present we have fewer than 50 clients.  We want to monitor basic up/down and disk free type metrics, but also to issue a variety of custom queries against our database and application to check its status.

So, my question is: How much network access would Nagios require for us to use it to monitor our application?  Our clients are sometimes reluctant to open their firewall to a vendor like us.  I'd like to know what's the minimum we need to ask of them so we can get good proactive monitoring of our installations.  Ideally we would not even need to ask for more than we have now, but that may not be realistic.  We have even toyed with the idea of buying a dual-NIC machine at each client to put inside their firewall just to communicate with our central monitoring server.  I don't know if that would help.

We are currently evaluating Nagios.  But we are also looking into other products (OpenNMS, Zenoss, Hyperic).  So any comparisons with them in this regard would be helpful too.

Thanks in advance,
Mike


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