[sllug-members]: Which Network Monitoring Solution?

[Jeremiah Roth]

On Nov 28, 2007, at 9:11 AM, Jeff Folsom wrote:

> 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.
>

I second the Groundwork recommendation.  Groundwork also has an auto- 
discovery feature that seems to work well on small - medium  
networks.  You can also integrate Cacti into the Groundwork interface  
and use single sign-on for both apps, giving you one place to go for  
all your monitoring.  Since GW uses nagios, you can use all the  
plugins available on the web or write your own in any language.   
Basically you just have to return an exit code (0=OK, 1=WARN,  
2=CRITICAL) and print whatever you want to show up on the web page.

Groundwork has a few frustrations, but overall I like it.  In recent  
releases (5.x) they've tacked on a Java extension called Foundation  
that's useful but adds a LOT of overhead to the machine (our machines  
went from 10% avg CPU utilization to almost 60% average).  It can be  
disabled however if you have a more lightweight machine doing your  
monitoring.

-Jeremiah