Re: Web Server Monitoring

["Jim McAtee" <jmcatee () mediaodyssey com>]

VNC isn't secure.  You can operate it over SSL, however.

Keep in mind that remote administration and remote monitoring are two
completely different animals.  You can hardly be expected to sit at a screen
using VNC and physically 'watch' it to tell if all web sites are running.

To monitor a web server, you need to pull web pages off of it.  You'll know
both if the physical machine and the underlying web server are operating.  Go
one further if you're using ASP, ColdFusion, PHP or another application server
and make sure you pull pages generated by the app server.  Pings only tell you
if the machine itself is alive.

There are many monitoring software packages available, both open source and
commercial, with differing levels of sophistication.  They might send an email
notification, dial a pager, or even remotely restart a dead application.

What is the OS and web server?  For Windows 2k/2k3 for remote administration,
Terminal Services is supposed to be fairly secure, since the session is
encrypted.



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tony Turner" <tnyturner () mindspring com>
To: <firewall-wizards () honor icsalabs com>
Sent: Friday, September 12, 2003 6:44 AM
Subject: [fw-wiz] Web Server Monitoring


> We have several web servers that we support throughout the southeast.  We
usually use VNC.  I have a few questions for you.  How secure is VNC and what
are some known security risks.  What is the best way to monitor these servers?
have used large scale monitoring tools that create tickets whenever a server or
a switch stops responding, but this was all on the same network.  I am looking
at a program called Networkview.  This product gives me a GUI interface with
all of my sites and let's me know which are up or down.  It will also email me
if something goes down.  It seems that it works great locally, but I need
something that I can use over the Internet.  Networkview will ping these IP
addresses, but most of these webservers are behind routers or firewalls that
block ICMP.  WIll SNMP work over the internet and is it really necessary to
block ICMP.  How hard is SNMP to set up and where do I start?
> Thanks for any help!

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