I manage around 15 WWW/FTP servers, and 23 SQL servers (with varying versions of SQL). I’d like to develop some sort of dashboard so that I can easily see the servers, make sure they are online, determine how much free space they have (including individual drive space), make sure SQL instances are running and/or IIS is running, store miscellaneous information about them such as which applications are hosted on which servers, and provide quick access to do things like RDP into them.
My question is fairly simple. What sort of technology should I use to develop this dashboard? Is there a way I can do it without requiring a client-side portion to be hosted on each server? I’m mainly familiar with ASP/ColdFusion which is what the majority of our environment is, but I also know enough C++ and C# to get through projects (obviously with a lot of looking up stuff).
Are there any free open source projects that currently offer this functionality? I’m not big on re-inventing anything when it’s already available.
This question should have probably been asked on serverfault.com not stackoverflow.com. At any rate, none of the answers provided by users were acceptable. I did find what seems to be the best possible fit and it’s called nagios. I’m looking more into it and seeing if it’s something we could use.