On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 12:41:26PM -0500, C. Bensend wrote: > > nagios is shit. misdesigned, horrible code, and someone who obviously > > doesn't understand blocking semantics of sockets writing that part of > > the code... > > > > that said, I use it, too. and as almost every other serious user with > > at least a little bit of standards left I hate it. > > I cannot speak to the quality of code; I couldn't code my way out of > a wet paper bag and am horribly unqualified to comment.
Henning is completely accurate (*). Nagios code is shite and reflects poorly on the engineering skills of the creator. Its near-monopoly position in the community is based on two factors: 1) Price. Although you pay dearly in time spent setting it up, maintaining it, and in outages caused by it (keep reading). 2) It's the least crappy of all crappy open-source monitoring options. > However, this is a majority of my job where I am now, and I don't > dislike it. It's infinitely extensible, makes it simple to write > plugins for stuff that you can't already find one for, and has a > fairly large community. We used it for a very long time on a very large scale. While it is extensible, it promotes poor design choices and puts no limitations on the style or number of shite extensions. But my biggest beef is on some of the design choices that allow you to shoot yourself in the foot. As my therapist would say, Nagios is an "enabler". Take for example, Nagios acknowledgments. They never expire, so it's very easy to ack something and forget about it. For days. Or better yet, the idea of "flapping". At face value, this seems like a good idea. But whatever happened to actually *responding* to an alert when something goes wrong. Let me get this straight... you WANT your monitoring system to stop alerting you when your shit goes down? What am I missing here? > It's a *helluva* lot better than Mon or Big Brother, both of which > I've used in the past, and both of which made me weep tears of > blood. See above. (*) I should disclose that I'm the Prod. Mgr. for Circonus, a SaaS version of Reconnoiter with trending, fault detection and notifications. Circonus is not free, but is based on Reconnoiter which is actively developed as an open-source BSD-licensed project. Both were engineered to directly address the pain we've experienced over the years working with "solutions" like Nagios and Cacti. So although it's fair to consider me biased towards our software, suffice it to say that if Nagios didn't suck so badly we never would have developed either Reconnoiter or Circonus. There are some OpenBSD-Reconnoiter users in the community; if you're interested in finding out more about Reconnoiter, ask around or check out the project website. http://labs.omniti.com/labs/reconnoiter -- Jason Dixon DixonGroup Consulting http://www.dixongroup.net/
