What is Reddit's opinion of Server Density?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

You wrote them. We published them.

“How can something so scary, look so cool on my desk?”

“Stuff made out of (bad) dreams. Get it!”

“Yikes”

Sysadmins officially agree: the scariest thing in life is real life. There’s a lot that can go wrong when looking after infrastructure in real life. So we asked you: Has anything gone really wrong for you? We took the best of your answers and printed the ultimate collection of sysadmin horror.

Behold: “No Dice” (cue: scary Bouhahahahaha sound) The “Sysadmin Horror Stories” featuring your very own horror stories.

A tribute to all the lost servers, lost sanity (and lost paychecks!):

• We’ll never sell the books, we’ll give them away.
• The contributors (whose story we used) will get a free copy.
• We’ll print ~ 75 to giveaway on Halloween.

So what are you waiting for? Register for the giveaway over here.

I'm part of the team @ Server Density so I'm obviously biased, but I'd definitely give our server monitoring a test drive. We offer a 15 day free trial, great UI and dedicated support team. Email [email protected] if you need any help with the switch and good luck with whoever you choose.

You are right in that some services are quite expensive. There are many companies in this game. Example: Server density 10 servers for $100 per month https://www.serverdensity.com/pricing/

$100 per month is much cheaper than an engineer. I do consider that just a "few bucks per month" if the value of a company truly relies on knowing and relying on work being done in their system.

If you work in a regulated and compliance industry, then yes, your cost goes up in terms of self-built and maintained monitoring, but I didn't see that as a constraint in what was described.

This is pretty common. E.g. SD does this pretty nicely: https://www.serverdensity.com/newrelic/. Also check if there are searches around '$brand alternative', it's pretty common.

As for the legality, I'd consult with an attorney about this.

We use Server Density with the Tether agent, with a bunch of custom plugins to monitor ~200 servers we have up in Azure.

Full Disclosure - I don't work for Server Density, but I did write the Tether agent (which I have open sourced)

See Server Density website monitoring, will allow you to monitor a website HTTP/HTTPS or a TCP service from multiple locations and providers across the world.

Hey I work for a company called Server Density and we do server monitoring as a service. You should be able to get set up with graphs, dashboards and alerts pretty quickly. We also offer a 15 day free trial, so give us a go.

It's self service, but I'd be happy to help answer any questions you might have / help you get started and ultimately would be really interested to know what you think.

I work for them, so am in no way impartial :)

P.S. The rest of the community are more able to recommend other solutions, but I've heard good things about Zabbix (open source).

Yes, but the term "server" is relative. You could easily install Spiceworks on the PC that functions as their POS database server and it would probably be just fine. You would at least get some degree of monitoring and alerting without needing to deploy any new hardware.

If you want more detail or capabilities than what Spiceworks can offer, I would start looking into some hosted solutions like ServerDensity or LogicMonitor.