julianps

Having installed a simple desktop Widget and receiving pretty uninspiring results for the "speed" of my Surpass DS I did a bit of Googling for surpass hosting is slow to find that I am not alone in making the same observation.

Reading elsewhere I came across a product called Lithium; "..Lithium is a single-application solution for network, server and appliance monitoring. With a stunning monitoring console for both Mac OS X and Windows, Lithium is an end-to-end solution for monitoring your network infrastructure..."

Lithium has a CentOS core and so far as I can tell requires a PostgreSQL database to run.... of course I'll need Surpass' to endorse and install it so that we can all agree on the results generated.

And at under 300$ it seems to provide a level-playing-field for assessing the real-world performance of my DS both now (small server, low bandwidth) and in the future when (hopefully) things get a bit more demanding.

Has anyone experience of Lithium or similar or have links to any forum or review sites where I might get a bit more inside-track on how it works?

Thank you in advance for your thoughts.

JiF

removed

~$300 to monitor your network connection? Honestly, this sounds like overkill for your setup. You can probably do the same thing with Cacti -- or at least something similar that gives you all the information you need.

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Unofficial IRC Channel: #surpass EFNet
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julianps

My bog-basic DS will cost me over 1,200$ in hosting alone this fiscal; 300$ to know whether that's well spent sounds like a bargain to me.

Especially when you consider I could add 300$ to my time-sheet this evening simply reviewing, installing, configuring and testing Cacti; that's before I get a single result.......

And anyway what's wrong with my setup?

julianps

As a footnote to this; non-server admin types (excluding enthusiastic hobby-techies) should be advised that Cacti is a not a consumer grade product. All of the options and commands required to make it run could easily be undertaken on WHM/cPanel (ie consumer grade) if one knew how but instead the instructions exist at a whole different level.

removed

Sounds like your mind is made up. One additional thing I can suggest would be the Munin monitoring software, which you can install through WHM... it may be just what you're looking for, without the $300 price tag.

I still think that "Lithium" is overkill for you (it seems to be aimed at more of an enterprise level, multi-server management setting) but if you can justify the $300 payment, go for it.

__________________
Unofficial IRC Channel: #surpass EFNet
Unofficial = No official support. Support requests can be submitted to our helpdesk.

julianps

i'm not really looking for alternatives to lithium but if support can add all of the missing pre-requisites of running cacti on surpass/ds and i can see it i'll be glad of the tip, believe me.

i've no time for axe grinding and i've never "..made up my mind.." in my life (ask my wife); lithium/free runs on mac minis at macminicolo (it even runs on appletv+linux, and there's no less "..enterprise level.." than appletv servers; believe me) and whilst there's a cost to running it on production sites (and i blame the anti-ms brigade for convincing the world good software should cost less than the servers it runs on) there's also a return.

hey i run have a mint too, despite analytics/urchin being "free".

and expressionengine despite wordpress being free.

and cubecart even though oscommerce is free.

but i hate 2020realty and evangelise open-realty, which is free.

and you've no idea how much time and money has gone into coming to those conclusions......

julianps

Having elected to load Lithium onto my DS and to test Cacti on my Reseller it turns out that Surpass cannot run Cacti on Reseller accounts.
The final sentence made me smile though (..and quite how would doing that test the performance of my reseller account?)

Oh, the joys of tech..