Outgoing Connection from Server, For monitoring servers behind firewalls

[tfjield]

Many of the servers that I want to monitor are in secure data centers where I can only access them via VPN. However, I would like to monitor the servers continually.

Most of these servers are allowed to make outgoing connections...

Instead of the client initiating the connection (an incoming connection to the server) the server could initiate the connection (an outgoing connection.) If the server maintained a list of IP's that it would try to connect to, then any clients listening on those IP's would be able to monitor the server.

Thanks!

[RobertMB]

An IP is usualy a Number in the Format xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, you are reffering in the last Bit of your Post to Ports.

Anyway, it's not totaly clear what you realy want,
do you want to Monitor the Server Stats,
check if they are responsive or what?

If you want to check on the Stats you could use some kind of a Database (SQL? PHP?) and run a Cronjob on the Servers for Uploading those Infos gathered by Samurize (Servermode?), which is set to XML Output.

[tfjield]

Hi RobertMB,

Sorry for the delay in responding. For some reason I didn't get the email notification, and I completely forgot about this post.

Perhaps I'm not clear how Samurize works for monitoring remote machines, but I'll describe my understanding.

In the standard server/client concept like I believe is used by Samurize, the machine that you want to monitor is the server. In order to monitor a server on the client machine, the client needs to make a TCP/IP connection to the server. Usually, this is an outgoing connection from the client and an incoming connection to the server. However, if the server is behind a firewall, this may not be possible unless an exception is added to the firewall.

It would be nice to allow the option to work in reverse, i.e. the server would attempt to make an outgoing connection to the client. (So technically, since the client would be listening, it's the server, now, but I hope you know what I mean.)

I have used this type of architecture in the past, where the information being transmitted by the server is sensitive, and thus no ports were allowed to be opened in the firewall.

I think you did give me a workaround, however, which is automatically upload the xml generated output to a database or remote file store, where it could then be retrieved by the client machine.

Thanks again!

[RobertMB]

I don't know how that should be possible, since the Server would need to know your IP to initiate the Connection, and some Folks' ISP enforces non-static IP-Addresses, mine for Example.

I'm advising you to use of an FTP Service, as it is the easiest possible Way, imo.