Nagios is a wonderful tool. However, there are limits to what you can do with it directly. As my colleague Brad discussed in a recent blog post, using NRPE is a powerful tool for Windows. For complicated web checks that require multi-step operation, we use: WebInject....
Engineering Operations
How to setup basic Windows monitoring with Nagios
In my previous blog post, I talked about how to setup NSClient++ for Windows which is very solid Nagios NRPE client. In this post, I'll describe how to setup some basic checks for your Windows server within Nagios and hopefully give you some ideas on what you should...
A Review of FDA 483 Observations – Top Med Device Issues Sited & Proper Response
This article reviews what an FDA 483 Observation looks like, some of the more common issues flagged in medical device companies, and how to respond.
One-click Installer for PADS Flow 9.3 and Update1
Everyone loves a one-click installer, but setting this up can be a headache, especially when a company changes the way this is done. You can setup your installation script to install both PADS9.3 and PADS9.3_update1 with a double-click of the mouse! Here are the first...
5 Things You Can Do To Make Your Software More Attractive To Medical Device Companies
Improve Your Ability to Sell Software into Medical Device Companies – In this paper we will share five things you can do to make your software application more attractive to medical device companies.
How to monitor Windows servers using Nagios and NSClient
One of the best monitoring software packages available for system administrators is Nagios. It's free, open source, has a large community of developers and users for support and can be relied upon to provide outstanding monitoring for mission critical devices. As part...
Cutting Costs and Boosting Revenue: How Effective Data Management Transforms Product Lifecycle Efficiency
According to Deloitte, 40% of the average engineer’s time is spent looking for information. This issue could be resolved with effective data management. Deciding which platform to store your organization’s data in can be difficult, as there are many great options on...
Network Monitoring with Cacti
In my initial blog post, I explained a little bit about Nagios, and how it can be configured to monitor any networking device or server. Nagios' basic operation is this: Define a check Execute the check at a specified interval Take the result of the check and...
License Management and Monitoring using X-Formation License Statistics
Over the past year, I have been doing a lot of work with clients who use high-end CAD and/or EE software tools from respected vendors like Cadence, Synopsys, and Mentor Graphics. The majority of these software tools require a license server to be setup on your local...
Creating a low cost, high performance ESX cluster
As Senior Systems Integrator for SPK and Associates, a California based IT services company specializing in infrastructure management services, I recently completed an interesting project. The goal was to create an ESX cluster for a small engineering group...
Running Pro/INTRALINK 3.4 on Windows 7, 64-bit
I recently came across a forum post asking for advice on the combination of running Pro/Intralink 3.4 on Windows 7 64-bit. In short, I’m happy to report that we’ve been using this combination without incident: Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64-bit SP1, PTC...
How to setup a weekly backup job with Bacula
In my last post, I gave an overview of Bacula, the enterprise-level free backup software. For this post I wanted to dig into the software a bit more and show how simple it is to setup a weekly backup job. One of the first things we do at SPK when working with a new...