[sllug-members]: Which Network Monitoring Solution?

[Jeff Folsom]

We use Groundworkopensource, www.groundworkopensource.com, which is 
basically a juiced up configuration utility / monitoring suite and we 
like it a great deal. You'll find that it simplifies your ability to do 
tasks like you've described, as opposed to manual nagios 
configuration.   We also used OpenNMS for quite a while, but we had 2 
problems:
1) Maintenance is time consuming, and configuration is cryptic for 
incoming admins.
2) We needed network interface graphs, and the built-in support is flaky 
at best, we ended up doing  a parallel install of Cacti (www.cacti.net) 
to get all the functionality we needed.

But, the autodiscovery of services was worth its weight in Sterling.


I've personally played with Zenoss a bit, and it is very nice, but 
Zenoss clients have a habit of crashing, with little facility for 
automatic restart. 



Best of Luck



Jeff Folsom
Marriott Library Student Computing - University of Utah


Nathan Lane wrote:
> Hi I am trying to get a network monitoring solution.  In the past 
> we've attempted to use Nagios, but couldn't figure out how to get it 
> to monitor whether a specific web page is accessible on a certain 
> server.  Today I am trying to set up an OpenNMS server to do the same 
> thing, and I am still running into road blocks - I can't find a 
> straight forward solution and I've been working on it for two days 
> (same problem as with Nagios).  I just found another one - Zenoss - 
> and I'm wondering if it's any better/easier/simpler to configure, or 
> if it stands up to Nagios and OpenNMS.
>
> Our platform is Ubuntu server 7.
>
> Our environment is a mostly Windows XP/Server 2003 network
>
> We want to monitor ICMP, HTTP, FTP, SNMP, and most important and 
> difficult (apparently) whether or not specific websites are accessible 
> constantly.
>
> Now I know that these [probably] all use slightly different models for 
> monitoring - Nagios is mostly SNMP, but has other capabilities and 
> it's easy to write plugins for using Perl.  OpenNMS has automatic 
> "discovery" of services, which we could really care less about, but it 
> seems to be difficult to make it check services that aren't 
> "discovered", like this website problem (discussed briefly above).  I 
> haven't tried Zenoss yet, I just discovered it on Sourceforge, and 
> I've been lurking on their IRC channel.  We currently use a commercial 
> system called ipMonitor, which is very pricey, and it doesn't even do 
> everything that we want (though I can't pinpoint what it was exactly 
> that it doesn't do)  but the configuration part of it is very self 
> explanatory and straight forward.
>
> So I need some help - in two areas, which system should I use, or is 
> there one the one-ups all of these, and can anybody help me configure 
> it to check whether a specific web page is accessible from the server 
> (following redirects automatically)?
>
> Thanks
>
> -- 
> Nathan Lane
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
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