On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 06:05:51PM -0400, Jason Dixon wrote: > On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 01:11:41PM -0700, James Peltier wrote: > > > > Being as I have never used Reconnoiter or Circonus, would you care to > > elaborate > > as to where these products "suck less" then Nagios or other solutions? I > > am > > looking into replacing out very aged monitoring system now and Nagios is > > the one > > that seems to stand out the most, although Zabbix and Munin look good in > > their > > own rights. > > Theo Schlossnagle (our CEO and the architect of Reconnoiter) answers it > pretty well in his talk from OSCON (requires flash, sorry). > > http://omniti.com/video/noit-oscon-demo > > In my words, Reconnoiter was designed to overcome a lot of the > performance and design problems native in Nagios and Cacti. It does a > lot of the things that either of those do, although it was designed > foremost as a highly scalable metrics collection "engine". Like Nagios, > the types of checks it can perform is virtually limitless. Unlike > Nagios, it is highly performant by design. Checks are deployed across > scout "agents" in your network, giving you both perspective and > non-persective collection points. > > The web UI in Reconnoiter is adequate. One of its really nice features > is the cli console, allowing you to configure checks and metrics in an > environment familiar to Cisco admins.
Though from cli you can't reuse templates, which are very handy - thus for me checks are added in config file. Admittedly reloading of it is pretty painless. > That said, the bread-and-butter > in Reconnoiter is the sort of graphs which you can create and recreate > with ease. Unlike trending tools like Cacti, you can easily correlate > dissimilar metrics in a single graph, with just a few clicks. Stack > sets, composite datapoints and RPN conversion of source and display > values are just a few of the other features that are easy to implement > within Reconnoiter. Well, for this it would be highly appreciated if you would expand on the templating system that there are seeds of present ;) Clicking through creating graphs for those 20 metrics each on 20 machines is a pain... > > Guidance is always appreciated. :) > > Reconnoiter is not for everyone. It's a very powerful system, but it's > not intended to be a drop-in replacement for other ECA/Trending systems. > It takes time and effort to get value out of it, but it offers some > Capacity Planning and Root Cause Analysis capabilities that aren't > available or usable in the alternatives. Agreed, it takes a while to figure out how to set it up, but the graphs are pretty impressive. And I already at least once post-factum created a set of graphs showing correlation between various metrics on multiple machines, showing where possibly the problem came from. > -- > Jason Dixon > DixonGroup Consulting > http://www.dixongroup.net/ -- viq
