Re: [SAGE] zenoss versus nagios

["Nicholas Tang" <nicholastang@xxxxxxxxx>]

For a dissenting vote, we actually just switched from Nagios to Zenoss
in '07 - maybe 6 months ago.  So far, it's been very good to us.  It
does, however, require a lot of time to get to learn it - and there
are still features that Nagios has had for years that Zenoss lacks.
All in all, though, I'd give Zenoss the edge - it's got some really
nice features Nagios completely lacks, and is improving at a much more
rapid pace, fueled by a much larger core developer team.  The thing
about Zenoss is that everything is centralized - you get syslog,
system check, snmpd checks, graphs, inventory, etc. all in one place,
with one install.  We no longer have to maintain a Cacti instance plus
a Nagios instance plus inventories plus a Network monitoring instance
plus a syslog parser like swatch, etc. etc. etc.  It's all in one
place, and because of this, you can cross-reference everything, and a
config change made in one place will affect everything, rather than
having to change it in a bunch of places.  That's a huge advantage.
Autodiscover new hosts, assign them to a group, it inherits the
monitoring settings, and you immediately start collecting stats on cpu
and disk and processes, both immediate (Nagios style) and long-term
graphing (Cacti style).  What used to be a laborious process (update
inventory; update Nagios by hand; update Cacti by hand; double-check
to make sure everything matches) is now mostly automated and pretty
simple.

Bear in mind, I say this as one of the original Netsaint (pre-Nagios)
users, so I'm a big fan of it and have been using it since Netsaint
0.2 I believe.  I don't say it lightly when I say that Zenoss has been
an improvement, and as I mentioned, there are still a lot of things I
like better about Nagios.  I do, however, think that Zenoss will get
those features relatively soon.

Disclaimer: I hired a sys admin away from [major media company] who
recently rolled out Zenoss for them across multiple locations,
monitoring a few thousand servers.  He spent quite a bit of time on it
there and learned a lot of the quirks and ins and outs, and then was
able to implement it here (one location, several hundred hosts) in
short fashion.  I can't vouch for someone uninitiated in Zenoss - it
does take time to learn and master, but it's worth the effort in my
opinion.  The initial setup was quick, but of course replicating every
custom check we had takes time.

One note: Zenoss is not nearly as useful if you don't use snmp heavily
- we run snmpd on every server and use that to monitor 99% of the
stuff in the environment, and so it has been fantastic.  We've been
moving checks from ssh (w/ keys) based checks to snmp based checks and
haven't had any real problems.

If you'd like, I can ask him (said SA) to speak to you about it, or if
you've got any general questions, I can forward them to him and post
his response here.  (He's not a member of SAGE.)

Nicholas

On Jan 3, 2008 1:47 PM, Paul Lathrop <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Nell,
>
> I highly recommend Nagios over Zenoss. Recently I had the opportunity
> to deploy a monitoring architecture from scratch for a company I
> consult for. We did our evaluation and with all the touted features
> Zenoss came out on top. Deployment was much easier than Nagios, and
> setting up monitors was a breeze. Unfortunately as we dug deeper into
> Zenoss functionality we ran into a number of problems. First, the
> feature set as documented just doesn't seem to be there.
> Auto-discovery of devices never worked despite hours of attempts
> including digging through the source to try to figure out how it was
> *supposed* to work. Modeling only seems to work correctly if you are
> using two specific devices (Dell and HP servers). The documentation
> makes it sound as though Zenoss makes it easy to decouple services
> from devices (important when your website doesn't run on any one
> server, but rather uses a server farm with load balancing, etc.)
> Sadly, that is not the case. Any monitors that weren't already baked
> in were extremely difficult to deploy. There was no way of setting a
> monitoring schedule, and no documentation about what the schedule
> would be by default. Documentation of Zenoss looks good, but it turns
> out to be made up of screenshots and describing the obvious, rather
> than any attempt to describe how to use it, or practical examples on
> making things work. Finally, the interface, while slick-looking, was
> buggy and unresponsive. We might have forged forward and attempted to
> be good open-source citizens and help correct these issues, but there
> were a couple of deal breakers. First, the monitoring just didn't
> work. We ran several fire drills where Zenoss reported the problem but
> failed to notice the resolution. One time, just out of curiousity, I
> left it alone for 24 hours before deciding it really wasn't going to
> pick up the fact that the issue was resolved. Second, attempts to seek
> assistance from the community and developers were generally met with
> silence, unless the question was already an FAQ. All in all, I think
> the Zenoss developers spent too much time trying to make a pretty
> interface and the marketing folks got carried away describing features
> that aren't there.
>
> Nagios is clunky, it is ugly, it is a pain to configure. It also
> works. So far, I haven't found any other Open Source monitoring system
> that does monitoring at least as well as Nagios, much less better or
> easier. I say stick with Nagios.
>
> --Paul Lathrop
>
>
> On Jan 3, 2008 7:10 AM, Neil Watson <sage@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > I'm beginning to plan a migration from an old Nagios 1 server to perhaps
> > Nagios 3.  It appears that much has changed from version 1 to 3 meaning
> > that at least some of the configurations will have to be altered or even
> > created anew.  Last summer I helped to write a comparison on monitoring
> > systems.  In that paper Nagios was a front running but Zenoss came out
> > on top.  Now I'm considering migrating to Zenoss instead of Nagios 3.
> >
> > Does anyone here have practical experience with Zenoss?  How does it
> > compare with Nagios?  Is it worth switching to?
> >
> > --
> > Neil Watson             | Debian Linux
> > System Administrator    | Uptime 4 days
> > http://watson-wilson.ca
> >
>