Expect for the Best. Be Prepared for the Worse.

A major issue in preparing for the disaster is getting clear visibility of your system. Especially if we are talking about distributed multi server and multi data center system.
Paul Venezia from InfoWorld provided a clear and concise description of the major open source tools (yes, free ones), that can give your clear visibility of your system.These tools can help you better know:

1. When does your CPU utilization get close to 100%?
2. When should you add more hardware or make an effort to boost your system performance?
3. What are your high traffic sources?
4. What is the root cause analysis for system poor performance?
5. What are the long term treadlines?
   

 Among the described tools you can find:

1.  Cacti - System Monitoring Web GUI that provides you graphs to every system metric that can be exposed in SNMP. Most recommended tool.
   
2.  Nagios - Network Monitoring tool.
3. NeDi - Physical network mapping tool (to which port your server is connected). Useful moslty if you are in the on-premise business rather than the cloud business.
4. Ntop - Traffic analysis tool that can help find what are the traffic sources, and which one keeps you bill so high.
5. Pancho - Configuring and backup Cisco routers. Again for the on-premise guys.
   

Using at least some of these tools you can better prepare for the disaster, and many times avoid it.

Keep Performing,
Moshe Kaplan. Performance Expert.