Re: [SAGE] zenoss versus nagios

[Stephen L Johnson <sjohnson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 2008-01-04 at 17:54 -0500, Neil Watson wrote:
> I'm going to expand this thread a bit.  Has anyone kicked the tires of
> Opennms?
> 

I've evaluated OpenNMS for a SLA reporting project at work. OpenNMS is
first and foremost a Network Monitoring system. It can autodiscovery and
add new devices into to be monitored is your like. If you put your SNMP
community strings (by IP addresses and/or ranges). OpenNMS will do a
deep probe and findout what the device is. It has good knowledge of
various work equipment, and will automatically add interfaces or
services it finds to be monitored. It does know about a decent range of
network services (http, ftp, ssh, telnet, smtp, snmp, etc). 

The downside is that is verbose on it's events. Any small new things
created an event which have to acknowledge. It's excruciating when
autodisovery is running. But once it's finished scanning its not so bad.
It's all Java and Tomcat. Adding new monitors isn't as so straight
forward as Nagios or Zenoss. And it's system monitor is limited to what
your can get out of SNMP via the HOST MIB. Trending is built in. It
starts charting as soon as a service starts to be monitored. It's got a
very flexible notifcation and user scheme. There is fine grain
permission for allow certain users or group of users access to
devices/services. 

The latest version is much easier to setup and run. You don't to setup
Tomcat anynmore in order to run the Web GUI Front-End. Once you'e grok
the setup, it's too bad. Basic setup is done via editing configuration
files. And it's seems to run well. Didn't have any issues except when
the system ran out disk space. It found a whole lot of devices other
Class B I sic'ed it on.
-- 
Stephen L Johnson <sjohnson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>