We can use your own monitoring systems, we can install a new system for you and migrate the hosts or if you have a small operation you can use our own monitoring system.
Our NOC team help our customers with:
Website Monitoring
Application Performance Monitoring
Server Monitoring
Network Monitoring
Cloud Monitoring, Private and Public
We have customers of all sizes, from a large Telecom with more than 500 hosts, mid size and small companies with only 2 hosts
Our NOC team works around the clock 24x7x365
Our customers save resources, their engineers have more time for important projects, we improve the operations and reduce downtime
A good backup plan is essential in order to have the ability to recover from
Human errors
RAID or disk failure
File system corruption
Data center destruction and more.
Here you have some suggestions:
Important features the backup software should have:
Open source software – You must use software for which the original source code is made freely available. This ensures that you can recover your data in case vendor/project stopped working on software or refused to provide patches.
Cross-platform support – Make sure backup software works well on the OS deployed on all desktop and server operating systems.
Data format – Open data format ensures that you can recover data in case vendor or project stopped working on software.
Autochangers – Autochangers are nothing but a variety of backup devices, including library, near-line storage, and autoloader.Autochangers allows you to automate the task of loading, mounting, and labeling backup media such as tape.
Backup media – Make sure you can backup data on tape, disk, DVD and in cloud storage such as AWS.
Encryption datastream – Make sure all client-to-server traffic will be encrypted to ensure transmission integrity over the LAN/WAN/Internet.
Database support – Make sure backup software can backup database server such as MySQL or Oracle.
Backup span multiple volumes – Backup software can split each backup (dumpfile) into a series of parts, allowing for different parts to existing on different volumes. This ensures that large backups (such as 100TB file) can be stored on larger than a single backup device such as disk or tape volume.
VSS (Volume Shadow Copy) – It is Microsoft’s Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) and it is used to create snapshots of data that is to be backed up. Make sure backup software support VSS for MS-Windows client/server.
Deduplication – It is a data compression technique for eliminating duplicate copies of repeating data (for example, images).
Commercial support – Open source software can provide community based (such as email list or fourm) or professional (such as subscriptions provided at additional cost) based support. You can use paid professional support for training and consulting purpose.
Reports and alerts – Finally, you must able to see backup reports, current job status, and get alert when something goes wrong while making backups.
Bacula – Client/server backup tool for heterogeneous networks
I personally use this software to manage backup and recovery across a network of computers including Linux, OSX and Windows. You can configure it via a CLI, GUI or web interface.
Operating system : Cross-platform
Backup Levels : Full, differential, incremental, and consolidation.
AMANDA is an acronym for Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver. It allows the sysadmin to set up a single backup server to back up other hosts over network to tape drives or disk or autochangers.
Amanda: Open Source Backup
Amanda is the most popular open source backup and recovery software in the world. Amanda protects more than a million servers and desktops running various versions of Linux, UNIX, BSD, Mac OS-X and Microsoft Windows operating systems worldwide.
Operating system : Cross-platform
Backup Levels : Full, differential, incremental, and consolidation.
Data format: Open (can be recovered using tool such as tar).
BackupPC is a high-performance, enterprise-grade system for backing up Linux, WinXX and MacOSX PCs and laptops to a server’s disk. BackupPC is highly configurable and easy to install and maintain.
Operating system : Linux/Unix and Windows
Backup Levels : Full and incremental (rsync+hard links and pooling scheme)
It is an easy to setup open source client/server backup system, that through a combination of image and file backups accomplishes both data safety and a fast restoration time.
UrBackup also continuously watches folders you want backed up in order to quickly find differences to previous backups. Because of that, incremental file backups are really fast.
Your files can be restored through the web interface, via the client or the Windows Explorer while the backups of drive volumes can be restored with a bootable CD or USB-Stick (bare metal restore). A web interface makes setting up your own backup server really easy.
Currently there are over 10,000 running UrBackup server instances (with auto-update enabled) with some instances having hundreds of active clients.
Operating system : Linux/FreeBSD/Unix/Windows/several Linux based NAS operating systems. Client only runs on Linux and Windows.
Other open source backup software for your consideration
The Amanda, Bacula and above-mentioned software are feature rich but can be complicated to set for small network or a single server. I recommend that you study and use the following backup software:
rdiff-backup – Another great remote incremental backup tool for Unix-like systems.
Burp – Burp is a network backup and restore program. It uses librsync in order to save network traffic and to save on the amount of space that is used by each backup. It also uses VSS (Volume Shadow Copy Service) to make snapshots when backing up Windows computers.
SafeKeep – SafeKeep is a centralized and easy to use backup application that combines the best features of a mirror and an incremental backup.
DREBS – DREBS is a tool for taking periodic snapshots of EBS volumes. It is designed to be run on the EC2 host which the EBS volumes to be snapshoted are attached.
Old good unix programs like rsync, tar, cpio, mt and dump.
Conclusion
I hope you will find this post useful to backup your important data. Do not forgot to verify your backups and make multiple backup copies of your data. Also, RAID is not a backup solution. Use any one of the above-mentioned programs to backup your servers, desktop/laptop and personal mobile devices.
Quality NOC S.L., which provides remote monitoring and management 24/7 Network Operations Center (NOC) that enables monitor, troubleshoot and maintain IT environments.
Open-source choices are good and can even match commercial tools, but you should know that using open-source monitoring requires a high level of involvement with the tool, which may not suit your needs. Open source requires a significant investment in time and resources to learn, install, configure, and use. Features may have to be built with the help of community support or an in-house IT team. The second consideration is security, which becomes an issue if your enterprise has strict security guidelines. Immediate custom fixes may not be available unless you spend time developing them. Or there could be instances when major security flaws aren’t discovered in the auditing process.
Icinga 2 is an open source monitoring system which checks the availability of your network resources, notifies users of outages, and generates performance data for reporting.
Scalable and extensible, Icinga 2 can monitor large, complex environments across multiple locations.
If you have NAGIOS clients already in your systems, the migration is very easy you can continue using same NAGIOS clients as they are like Nagios NRPE, NSClient, etc.
Many companies used NAGIOS for years and now have migrated to Icinga2.
Nagios® is one of the most popular and widely used free network monitoring tools. Network admins like Nagios because it does everything. Whatever it doesn’t have can be built, or has been built by the Nagios community.
There are two versions of Nagios. Nagios Core is open source and free, and Nagios XI is a commercial tool based on the Nagios Core but with added features. Nagios is popular due to its active development community and external plug-in support. You can create and use external plugins in the form of executable files or Perl® and shell scripts to monitor and collect metrics from every hardware and software used in a network. There are plugins that provide an easier and better GUI, address many limitations in the Core®, and support features, such as auto discovery, extended graphing, notification escalation, and more. Nagios can be overwhelming for beginners and enterprises that do not have enough IT support staff, but it provides good monitoring powers. For support, users can always get help from the Nagios community, or opt for a commercial support package from Nagios Enterprise. Quality NOC can provide support for installation, configuration and development of new features to check software and hardware.
If you have the time to invest in learning and mastering this tool, Nagios Core offers good network monitoring capabilities.
Cacti® is a network monitoring tool that allows you to collect data from almost any network element, including routing and switching systems, firewalls, load balancers, and servers, and put that data into robust graphs. If you have a device, it’s possible that Cacti’s active community of developers has created a monitoring template for it.
Cacti supports SNMP polling, which itself covers a wide range of network devices. You can also extend Cacti’s capabilities to use scripts, queries, or commands for data collection, and save it as a template to use for polling other devices for similar data sets. Cacti leverages the power of RRDTool, which is an open-source data logging and graphing system for storing polled data in the database, and creating graphs from the stored data sets. RRDTool’s data consolidation lets you store collected data forever, and is limited only by the size your storage. Cacti leveraging on RRDTool has the ability to generate any type of graph for any data set, and the graphing used in Cacti is the standard used by many open-source and commercial tools. Cacti also allows you to add multiple users and give them access with or without edit permissions, which is perfect for service providers and enterprises with a large NOC team.
Cacti’s strength lies in its community of developers who have contributed many plug-ins, scripts, and templates that can be used to monitor almost every type of device. We especially like its device support and graphing capabilities.
Zabbix is probably the most widely used open-source network monitoring tool after Nagios
Complex to set up, Zabbix® comes with a simple and clean GUI that makes it easy to manage, once you get the hang of it.
Zabbix supports agent-less monitoring using technologies such as SNMP, ICMP, Telnet, SSH, etc., and agent-based monitoring for all Linux® distros, Windows® OS, and Solaris®. It supports a number of databases, including MySQL®, PostgreSQL™, SQLite, Oracle®, and IBM® DB2®. Zabbix’s VMware® monitoring capabilities allow you to customize using any scripting or programming language, which is widely regarded as its best feature.
ntop, which is now ntopng (ng for next generation), is a traffic probe that uses libpcap (for packet capture) to report on network traffic.
You can install ntopng on a server with multiple interfaces, and use port mirroring or a network tap to feed ntopng with the data packets from the network for analysis. ntopng can analyze traffic even at 10G speeds; report on IP addresses, volume, and bytes for each transaction; sort traffic based on IP, port, and protocol; generate reports for usage; view top talkers; and even report on AS information. This level of traffic analysis helps you make informed decisions about capacity planning and QoS design, and also helps you find bandwidth-hogging users and applications in the network. ntopng has a commercial version called ntopng pro that comes with some additional features, but the open-source version is good enough to quickly gain insight into traffic behavior. ntop can also integrate with external monitoring applications such as Nagios for alerting, and provide data for monitoring.
Ntopng has some limitations, but the level of network traffic visibility it provides makes it well worth the effort.
Manage Cookie Consent
We use cookies to optimize our website and our service.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
