Error monitor for different applications

Question

Currently we have many applications, where each application has its own error notification and reporting mechanism, so we clearly have many problems:

• Lack of consistent error monitoring across different systems/applications: different GUIs, interfaces, different messages, etc.
• Different approaches for error notification per application (many applications use email notifications, other applications publish messages to queue, etc.).
• Separated configuration settings for reporting and monitoring per application: notification frequency, message recipients, etc.

You could add many other issues to the list, but the point is clear. Currently there is a plan to develop a custom application or service to provide a consistent and common solution for this situation.

Anyway, I am not sure if it is a good idea to create a custom application for this, I am sure that there should be a framework, platform or an existing solution or product (preferentially open source) that already solves this problem, so my question is: do you know what project or product to check before deciding to create our custom application?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Depending on how much information is written to application logs, you could consider using Hyperic. It's open source and has a lot of the features you are looking for.

http://www.hyperic.com/

Answer 2

Have a look at AlertGrid, it works as a centralized event handler, and notification dispatcher. It can collect events from different sources and you can easily manage event handling by creating rules in a visual editor. So, you can filter events, and raise notifications (email, sms, phone - works worldwide) whenever your custom condition is met. You can react not only to events that ocurred but also the ones that did not occur (detect missing 'heartbeats'). All you need is to feed AlertGrid with events (Signals), by a very simple API.

I'm not quite sure if this is what you're looking for. I'm in the AlertGrid dev team, if you had any questions - feel free to ask. We constantly develop this tool and appreciate any feedback.