I'll throw my two cents here in as well... We have a Nagios 3.0.6 installation here. My take on Nagios is that given enough time and hackery, it will do just about anything you think of. We kind of hit a wall with it as far as monitoring services / parameters on Windows systems, however -- we cobbled together a NRPE-based solution that calls upon a Windows Server running NRPE that makes WMI and a few PowerShell checks on different Windows hosts and returns the stats to our main Nagios server. However, this takes a lot of time and is somewhat brittle.
So, looking to get a lot more monitoring done with far less effort, we did some tire-kicking on commercial monitoring systems, and the one we selected was Paessler's PRTG. I have found it to be very easy to set up and maintain, and it has a bunch of common monitors right out of the box (as I'm sure all commercials systems as well as Nagios does.) You can also write your own custom monitors as well. I really like the UI, and it's basically like a merge of Nagios with Cacti (it keeps charts of service responses like Cacti does so you can get a service / uptime history.) It was not that expensive to purchase and support, and is priced on numbers of active monitored parameters. Anyways, may be worth a look: http://www.paessler.com/prtg I've also used Zabbix, Zenoss and What's Up Gold at past employers; all had their strengths and weaknesses, but I'd choose Nagios or PRTG over any one of them. HTH, Will -----Original Message----- From: tech-boun...@lists.lopsa.org [mailto:tech-boun...@lists.lopsa.org] On Behalf Of Phillip Steinbachs Sent: Friday, March 22, 2013 11:07 AM To: Edward Ned Harvey (lopser) Cc: LOPSA Technical Discussions Subject: Re: [lopsa-tech] nagios / cacti / spiceworks / zabbix / munin / zenoss On Fri, 22 Mar 2013, Edward Ned Harvey (lopser) wrote: > I've used zenoss before. Didn't like it. We had problems with the accuracy of metrics (I think it buffer overflowed or something, getting disk usage on a several TB volume, reported things like -50% full) ... even though "technically" it could allow you to create custom metrics via ssh and so forth, it was confusing, never got that working, etc. > > I haven't used any of these others. > > Looking at the nagios site, it looks like, you're supposed to install it on the server you monitor. Installing httpd, mysql, configuring selinux, etc. Which is not what I want. > > I want to install a centralized monitoring / alerting system, and deploy a tiny little plugin (or something) to each of the systems to be monitored. The production systems already run apache, mysql, etc, and I don't want any dependencies on any installation packages to conflict or cause any disruption to existing production services. If I need to configure httpd on the system to be monitored, it's a nonstarter. > > I primarily care about linux systems (but other OSes are nice to support too). Want alerts, both predictive and reactionary (notify me if a system is down, but also notify me when disk usage is over 90% or the CPU stays over 95% for 10 minutes, or the system begins thrashing swap, etc, so I can hopefully avoid system down.) etc. > > Thanks for suggestions. > If you want a simple to install and easy to manage Nagios based solution, look at Opsview Core. For your client systems, install the opsview-client (NRPE) and you're good to go. http://www.opsview.com/technology/downloads/opsview-core -phillip _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list Tech@lists.lopsa.org https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/ _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list Tech@lists.lopsa.org https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
