I wanted to mention an alternative, Zenoss. Zenoss calls
itself a "third generation" monitoring tool. It was
designed from the ground up for this goal.
The website is: http://www.zenoss.com/
Features include (from http://www.zenoss.com/product/ ):
* Configuration Management DB (abbr. CMDB)
* Inventory and Change Tracking
* Availability Monitoring
* Performance Monitoring
* Event Management
* Core Reports
I mention this because I'm planning on migrating to Zenoss. It does
more than Nagios+Cacti. It is compatible with any custom Nagios plugins
you may be using. You can also check out the screen shots at
http://www.zenoss.com/product/screenshots -- you'll notice it also
looks great.
Cheers,
Steven Black
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2 comments:
ZenOSS sounds great, and it looks great, but it doesn't work as great.
I installed ZenOSS. It blew itself up. I re-installed. It blew itself up again and stopped responding. I haven't created the courage to reinstall it yet again.
That's not very encouraging in a monitoring tool that's supposed to be up. Frequently I'd notice that ZenOSS would use a LOT of CPU and take a long time to respond (that is, before it completely stopped working).
ZenOSS has great ideas... like creating classes of devices that have the same settings, and being able to do some asset tracking.
It also seems a bit rushed, incomplete, and suffering from Object orientation fever. ZenOSS uses BOTH ZoDB and MySQL.
It was hard to get monitoring working with ZenOSS. I always had to keep going back to the manual and going step-by-step instructions. It has its own very nomenclature. I was never able to get the Nagios plugins to work. It insisted on monitoring things that I DIDN'T want it to monitor, because ZenOSS was incorrectly monitoring it and failing at it and sending me false alarms.
I even contemplated buying the enterprise edition, but figured that if I couldn't get a simple trial working the way I wanted, I shouldn't bother. Their price is about $100/DEVICE/year by the way.
I think ZenOSS will be very good one day, or at least it appears to have the right ideas. The current implementation doesn't seem very good, and when it comes down to it, I need a reliable monitoring system, not something to give me more headaches.
So I'm looking at Nagios and Cacti again. YMMV.
Roberto
It might be a little late, but I figure I'd step in on Zenoss' behalf and clear a few things up. Our installation needed some work, so the new 2.2 release has much easier installers that include all the dependencies required. It does use 2 databases, but they are not both SQL databases. The internal Zope object database is for managing configuration and MySQL is for capturing events. Our documentation has undergone a lot of revisions, we're always open to feedback. Enterprise pricing is available at several levels, starting at $66/device/year with discounts available for education and service providers. Hopefully we can make a better impression next time, let me know if the new 2.2 release helps.
Thanks,
Matt Ray
Zenoss Community Manager
mray@zenoss.com
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