victormadrid

The good people at Pandora FMS have put together an interesting compilation of all the best network monitoring tools. I'd like to take this opportunity to give my own opinion on the article and my personal experience with the tools mentioned. Quick FYI; the present analysis focuses on open source monitoring tools. I mention this, because licensed software, like Pandora FMS's Enterprise version, among others, feature many other tools and extra functionalities we could speak about. If what you're looking for is a licensed package you could check out Pandora FMS Enterprise, HP OpenView or BMC Patrol, among others (the last two aren't part of the present analysis). I'm going to limit the analysis to looking at server and network monitoring but of course there are many other elements and processes which can be monitored, such as applications, business processes and user experience, for which a more powerful tool, such as the aforementioned three, is better suited. On this occasion, however, let's take a look at the open source tools available. Despite the Pandora FMS analysis including PRTG in its top 16, personally I'd leave it off the list as the open version is quite limited. Nagios would be the go-to monitoring tool if this were still the year 2000, but it's not what it used to be, despite its lively community and market penetration (it's present in many organizations, and in many companies which you've probably heard of, naming no names), but more system admin adepts are migrating their set-ups, often to another name player; Zabbix. Zabbix is a good bet for keeping your system running smoothly, although you may find that somewhere down the line, your organization needs the functionalities that only an Enterprise tool can offer, namely; scalability; report generation; business process monitoring and trend analysis; user experience and other business-oriented functions. Once we've ruled Nagios out, due to its amalgam of modules, and its complicated configuration, we're left with Zabbix plus three other options: Zenoss, Icinga, and Pandora FMS. While Zenoss is a powerful piece of software, and its Enterprise version gives good results, I've yet to work with a set-up I've found to be installed and functioning at optimum levels. I've even had to go so far as uninstalling a Zenoss installation and reinstalling a new tool from scratch. The second time around, and due to the problems of dealing with a complex environment with so many applications, I went with Pandora FMS. Zenoss was fine in terms of compatibility, but the amount of nodes to monitor was a stretch. Icinga feels like an updated and improved Nagios. Or, at least, it does to me, despite not sharing the same code. Where it stands out, at least over Nagios, is in having a much better GUI, easier to configure and more standardized than Nagios's. Regarding Pandora FMS; in my personal experience, it's one of the best discoveries I've made in my career. I first came across it a few years ago when I had to install a monitoring system and I couldn't find anything that was up to the job, either a licensed solution or freeware. Until I came across Pandora FMS, in its open version. I have experience of monitoring in many different environments, not only networks and servers, but also cash registers, AC systems, TVs or whatever the client asked me to, and I found Pandora FMS to be extremely adaptable, and as powerful as any other open version. It's flexible enough to monitor technological infrastructure, plus the business processes taking place within the system. The downside is that the community around the software isn't very extensive, meaning a small knowledge base from which to draw and, consequently, a user-knowledge standard which is probably higher than with other solutions. To sum up, if you're looking for a new monitoring tool, whether to install from zero or to migrate from an existing set-up, I recommend taking a look at Pandora FMS, Zabbix or Icinga. The solution you end up installing will depend a lot on the characteristics of your system, so it's difficult to recommend an outright favorite, but any one of these three options will give you the necessary system oversight, at least at the level of network/server monitoring. Has anyone had a similar experience? If you have any questions about this article, or about monitoring in general, don't hesitate to contact me. Happy to assist.

Nowadays it’s not uncommon for companies to use Nagios as their main monitoring tool for networks, systems and applications. But it’s worth mentioning that Nagios is no longer the only one to meet those features, and it’s not rare to see people giving preference to other tools such as Zabbix or Pandora FMS. And this is because, for a few years now,there are a whole bunch of monitoring tools available on the market. Although most share the same features and offer most of the same solutions, not all are the same, which can make it confusing to choose one. In this article we want to compare two of the most used solutions: Nagios and Zabbix, and line them both up against one of the more “underground” solutions: Pandora FMS, for perspective purposes. Management and Setup Now it’s in this aspect that we can appreciate the largest differences between all three tools. Whilst both Zabbix and Pandora FMS have a web-based management interface, Nagios has decided to keep it old school, and is still managed through a complex maze of text files, scripts and manual procedures that also make a necessity to use third party tools in order to deploy it, such as Chef or Puppet. Now if we had to compare these three in terms of management ease, although all three are somewhat stable, Nagios can be an utter chaos to manage. Regarding this, which is very related to the tool’s learning curve; both Nagios and Pandora include Enterprise Editions, while Zabbix doesn’t. Comparison in terms of plugins and “out of the box” monitoring Our first conclusion drawn up 'till now is that both Nagios and Zabbix need an array of plugins installed in order for them to be efficient and offer complete features. Although, as a negative note, Zabbix doesn’t have an “official” plugin library for its community. On the other side, Nagios doesn’t offer the possibility to work with Enterprise tools such as Oracle in its “Core” version. In its favor though, Nagios has a huge library but it’s low on maintenance since all the plugins in it are 100% open source and there’s no company to back it up or take care of them. Pandora, despite not having such a huge library as Nagios, has just under 500 company maintained plugins and, disregarding the fact that some of those plugins have paid licensing, they’re all focused toward daily products that are “real”, not only towards open technology. Zabbix on its side has a powerful template and trigger definition system that’s based on regular expressions. As a counterpart, on Nagios this is inexistent —at least it’s not available on its open source version— and on Pandora FMS it’s been replaced by visual prompt screens and wizards that are integrated with the WEB interface, and tend to be much more user friendly. Community value Hands down, the largest community is that of Nagios, simply because it put the flag up in uncharted terrain and has been so many years running, that it’s inevitable for its community to be large. As a matter of fact, the amount of Nagios forks is near infinite: OpsView, OP5, Centreon, Icinga, Naemon, Shinken, and many more. This, as we mentioned before, leads to a very unorganised ecosystem of plugins and tools that can be crossed over from one fork or Nagios system, to another. Considering each branch has its own mindset and development, they end up being totally incompatible with other branches and with the original project, Nagios. REPORTS AND GRAPHS All three of the mentioned tools have a “customisable user screen” that they all apply with slight differences. Nagios is again the most unique one of the three since it needs a plugin with its own entity (Nagvis) but on the other two, this feature is included out of the box. The reports that Nagios generates are quite poor when put in comparison. Zabbix and Pandora FMS both improve on this feature, although if what you’re looking for is to generate a report good and simple enough to turn in to your boss or a customer, Pandora FMS is probably going to be the best option. AGENTS Some people consider agent-based monitoring technology to be something of the past, but this is not entirely true, since very large manufacturers such as CA, HP or IBM still use agent-based tech. They do so making it seem like they’re using 100% agentless monitoring tools. Nagios has nice selection of agents but, like so many other things on Nagios, they are meant to be quite DIY, and on many occasions this leads to a lack of maintenance or to some of them being outdated and near useless. Zabbix, on the other hand, has a lot more complex features “built in” to the agent itself that can’t be applied using scripts since it forces the agent to work on a low level, instead of at user level. SCALABILITY For this aspect we have to limit ourselves to comparing what each company proves in their success stories and customer examples. Based on this information Pandora FMS has some of the largest reported installations. According to Pandora FMS’ claims and to how their distributed architecture works (included in v 6.0 and onward), on the Enterprise Edition you can monitor up to a million nodes. Nagios has a broad spectrum of DIY ways to offer distributed monitoring. On the other hand, both Zabbix and Pandora FMS offer similar models, with the difference that Pandora has a specific product (called the Metaconsole) for larger, distributed or more complex environments. We hope that after reading this article you feel a little more informed when it comes to choosing the best monitoring tool for you and your company. If you have any doubts, suggestions, or general opinions, we insist you leave them in the comments section. You can find more detailed information in Zabbix vs Nagios vs PandoraFMS: an in depth comparison |

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Interesting, thanks for sharing. Lets evaluate it to know whether is worth it or not to pay for.

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Pandora FMS, using the open or Enterprise version. Network monitoring Worth to check it out.