[sllug-members]: Which Network Monitoring Solution?

[weales at xmission.com]

If you want to monitor Windows boxes via Nagios, there is an easy to  
use app called NSClient.  It runs as a service and sends info on the  
box to Nagios.  You can set Nagios up to show quite a lot about what  
services are running, disk space, uptime; all the usual stuff.  It can  
show you if the WWW service is running, but I don't know if it can  
show you whether a particular page is up...

I tried Zenoss last spring, and I found it wasn't ready for prime time.

Cacti, anoter good tool, and Nagios have a learning curve, but are  
very stable and easy to upgrade, once you've got the kinks of your  
installation worked out.


Ron




Quoting Nathan Lane <nathamberlane at gmail.com>:

> 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
>