Advice on Monitoring tool

[Guest monkeyx]

Starting to look at upgrading our mixture of monitoring tools to a more centralised platform running on Linux.

 

I am looking at Nagios/Cacti, Zabbix, Zenoss and Groundwork.

 

My initial preference was for Nagios/Cacti. But zabbix seems to have some loyal Nagios converts?

 

I am particuarly interested in getting better network monitoring/utilisation information from our managed 3com switches. I am sort of taking it for granted that all these products will integrate to Linux logs/Windows event viewer?

 

I also prefer tools that can be set to only report a problem once, rather than spam you every 5 mins and also report that a problem is resolved.

 

Anyone able to share any information on any of the above mentioned tools, it maybe there is one I have missed from the list

 

Thanks,

 

monkeyx

[Joedetic]

Sorry I'm not going to be of much use here because I'm yet to look into nagios in anger (and believe me...I will be!).

 

Cacti isn't a monitoring solution that will e-mail you. It's a graphing tool. Archive data etc.

 

At the moment I've just put in our box with a proof of concept installation of nagios and cacti on it.

 

Nagios is only configured to monitor a couple of hosts at the moment (and I've simulated an error) just for the purposes of showing to the head of ICT what it does. It's not setup to e-mail or anything fancy because I'm not meant to be actually looking into this until after 22nd July.

 

Cacti is setup to monitor our HP Procurve core switch (4810gl iirc). Again...just proof of concept.

 

I started to add in a couple of other switches just because I had some time on my hands. The Procurve 2510s don't graph anything and don't show any SNMP information (I think i've got them setup wrong) and I've not tried the 2626s yet.

[mrayzenoss]

Take it with a grain of salt since I'm the Zenoss Community Manager, but Zenoss is probably a very good fit for your needs. It runs on a centralized server (on Linux, other Unixes or VMware) and remotely monitors network devices and Unix and Windows servers. Linux syslog and Windows event logs are processed as well. Alerts are rolled up so that duplicates aren't sent without acknowledgment, and escalation and alerts to multiple admins are supported as well.

 

Zenoss Core is GPL and supports everything you have listed. If you need support or some of the Enterprise features (mostly finer-grained monitoring and integration with commercial applications), educational licensing is available at reduced rates.

 

Let me know if you have any questions.

 

Thanks,

Matt Ray

Zenoss Community Manager

community.zenoss.com

[email protected]