[SLL] Network Monitoring Tools

[Ski Kacoroski]

Eric Kahklen wrote:
>> On 8/17/06, Eric Kahklen <eric at kahklen.com> wrote:
>>> I've been looking at Nagios as a solution to monitor all my Windows
>>> and Linux servers.  I've never used it and wondered what kind of luck
>>> people have had with it? or if there is a better choice?

I have used Nagios and OpenNMS and seriously looked at Zabbix.  Nagios 
is really, really nice with a few caveats:

1. You can to explicitly set up each device and service, there is no 
autodiscover of devices and services.  For small sites this is not a 
problem, but for large sites not yet running an automated configuration 
management system this can be a problem (especially the maintenance 
headache of trying to keep the devices and services up-to-date in Nagios 
as your systems change).  AFAIK, this has not changed in the newest 
releases.

2. Graphing used to be a second thought which meant many locations had 
two systems - Nagios for alerts and then Cacti or something else for 
graphs.  I believe that this is no longer the case, but I would check it 
out for sure.

OpenNMS is what I am current using primarily because it does 
autodiscover of devices and services along with nice graphing.  The 
downside I have found is that it finds many services that I am not 
interested in which is a pain.  One very nice thing is that it can use 
almost any Nagios plugin (a new feature).  In terms of complexity, it 
takes about the same amount of effort as Nagios (especially on debian as 
there is an apt repository).

I tried Zabbix about a year ago when looking at systems, but the UI was 
strange enough that I dropped it.  I also looked at jffnms.

Hope this helps.

cheers,

ski

-- 
"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it
  connected to the entire universe"            John Muir

Chris "Ski" Kacoroski, kacoroski at comcast.net, 206-501-9803