Remote monitoring web based tool

You can use MRTG for checking and logging badwith and graphing.

If you want to monitor SNMP and check if the sytem is up or down you can use something like Nagios or Cacti ..

Please check them and let me know which one is more likely to help you out so that I can give you directions about them..

Cheers,
K.

For now I am looking for a tool that would simply check if systems are up or down.  I am looking for something simpler than Nagios.  Cacti may be fine.  Should be easy to deploy and easy to use.

Thanks for your response.

You're welcome how a bout a simple script doing ping and alerting through e-mail such as this:

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/simple-linux-and-unix-system-monitoring-with-ping-command-and-scripts.html

Experts, that you very much for your time.

My company has a two months procedure to put a cron entry.  So I am looking for something really simple that I would be able to implement within my stay in the department.

@arnold:-  We already have a lot of SNMP traffic coming from ours servers--probably this implies they have agents.  Networking doesn't appear to be an issue. They have some departmental issues and politics more complex than I can understand.  There are monitoring tools in place too, but it is again a departmental issue.  All what my boss wants is to put something in place that would primarily only inform us about servers up and down status.  I will study links. Thanks.

@undersky:- I myself was looking at webmin and you are absolutely correct but, I am looking for something very simple.  Utilize existing traffic and get hosts up/down status.  Any extra information would be beneficial but not our priority at this time. Thanks for your time.

@KeremE:  You are absolutely correct, and I had just proposed the same to my boss but he doesn't want any scripts.  He simply wants some simple tool.  We were considering MRTG but I thought there may be something simpler.  My job is too restrictive I wish I didn't take it just because of money and big company name.  Thank you.

In this type of a scenario, there are more daunting tasks i.e. the access to existing SNMP agents might be/is likely restricted.  Do you have a server under your control that is in the correct "network" space that it has rights to access all the servers you wish to monitor?

Yes, there is a server, my team's jump box.  There is PHP and MySQL on it as well.  It is in the correct network.  I don't think accessing the traffic is and issue but you may be right, who know what comes up.  As of now, I don't think accessing traffic is an issue.  My team thinks it may not be hard if we could get a simple tool that would just tell us hosts status by examining existing traffic.

Why not use a web page with php that will update the status of the hosts your have?
You could set up the page as an auto-refresh and have the notification as part of the php script.

As an example
http://www.dynamicdrive.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-14499.html

Here is some more information.  My team wants to be able to capture SNMP traffic and don't want to create any additional traffic (pings, telnets, etc.).  That traffic is already there.  MRTG exists but team is finding it very hard to maintain because we have to keep adding servers all the time due to a perpetually increasing number of servers and as they explained with MRTG, they cannot modify files everywhere.  So our criteria is to get something not hard to maintain at all.  As I said before, capturing SNMP traffic is not an issue.  They want some tool that can be maintained easily and if required, should be able to do any additional queries.

When you say capture you mean SNMPtraps?
If what your environment is like, I'd suspect that you would need to either have a system on a network that has all the rights i.e. poll snmp hosts as well as is defined within the hosts as an authorize source of snmp requests.
I do not think there is a way for you to collect the data you want without generating additional SNMP poll requests or getting the department that currently has this information to provide your team access to see it.

Thank you experts.  I appreciate your precious time.