Re: Network monitoring suggestions

I've used nagios for a couple years, and before that, I used big brother
for a couple years.

I prefer nagios to big brother; big brother is horrid.

Nagios is really useful. It has a lot of things built in to it
(escalations, thresholds, etc) that are useful for flapping services,
and the web front end is a great way to get a birds-eye view of things
so you can either disable them or address them (I used it recently to
figure out how many systems and services I had that were using broken
snmp community strings).

Furthermore, just about any programming or scripting language that you
know (perl, php, bash anyone?) can be used to extend nagios'
functionality further. We have a mixture of korn, bash and perl scripts
that we use to check ther services that nagios doesn't have built in.

The extra configurability of nagios is a definate plus.

Finally, before I finish stroking nagios' ego, there's a neat program
called nagwatch that sits on your desktop and gives you a quick idea of
what's going on. Mine currently has about 10 warnings, and three
criticals. During the work day, it's immensely useful because I can
usually fix things before the thresholds are reached, and the pages
start getting sent out. You can similarly fiddle with nagwatch and
tinker with what it displays,how often, etc.

My vote is for nagios.

Adam

Joshua Kugler wrote:

>I know...grossly broad topic that brings up all kind of answers like SATAN,
>SAINT, mrtg, etc.
>
>But, anyway...
>
>I'm needing to implement a system for monitoring several servers we have here.
>I know the current "hot" project is Nagios. But I was wondering if anyone
>has any experience with system monitoring software they'd like to share:
>Nagios, and others. Specifically, this project: http://www.opennms.org/wiki/
>has been around a lot longer than I've known about Nagios. Any experience
>with it.
>
>Thanks for tips and hints.
>
>j----- k-----
>
>
>

---------
To unsubscribe, send email to <aklug-request@aklug.org>
with 'unsubscribe' in the message body.
Received on Thu Oct 6 17:29:31 2005