Network UPS Tools is a collection of programs which provide a common interface for monitoring and administering UPS hardware.

Did you know your drive was SMART? Actually: Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology. It can be used to gather information about your hard drives and offers some additional information about the status of your storage devices. It can also be used with other tools to help predict drive failure.

Awareness of what's happening on your network, and why, makes the difference between average and excellent network administration. Great tools are needed to obtain this knowledge quickly and accurately. Fortunately, some of the best network monitoring tools are free. This article lists the top five.

This is part two of a three part series on distributed monitoring. You can use passive service and host checks to allow non-central Nagios servers to collect data from a network of machines and then transfer that information to a central Nagios server.

To keep your system in optimum shape, you need to be able to monitor it closely. [...] In this chapter, we look at some of the basic monitoring tools, along with some tactics designed to keep your system up longer. Some of the monitoring tools cover network connectivity, memory, and hard drive usage, but all should find a place in your sysadmin toolkit.

Learning Nagios 3.0 is a comprehensive configuration guide to monitor and maintain your network and systems. It is a practical guide to setting up the Nagios 3.0 open source network monitoring tool, installing and configuring Nagios 3 on various operating systems. It will help understand system monitoring and how Nagios works.

Most Linux users are familiar with the top command. Top shows you a list of processes on your system and provides a ton of useful information such as their CPU usage and owner. Unfortunately, this isn’t always enough data and many people don’t know where to turn next.

For some time I have been using the American Power Conversion (APC) uninterruptible power supply (UPS) daemon Apcupsd to interface my desktop computer with my APC Back-UPS ES 550.

GNetWatch is a network monitoring and performance testing tool that lets you can see the status of hosts on your network, send ping requests of varying size and quality of service to hosts, and investigate SNMP information. GNetWatch includes support for using Wireshark and nmap to snoop packets and investigate hosts on the network.