On 6/18/2010 12:06 PM, Joseph L. Casale wrote:
It depends on what you are doing, but if it is mostly snmp data collection and icmp/tcp application monitoring, OpenNMS will probably do it out of the box with autodiscovery and no client setup. If you have lots of custom nagios client code, you'll probably have to twiddle some ugly XML config files to get that data collected. The mail list support is fairly good if you have problems.
Les, Compared to Nagios, how difficult was it to get OpenNMS running in your environment? I found Nagios trivial but have never really rolled my sleeves up with OpenNMS, I have just sort of kicked the tires over the years...
I've never done Nagios - I don't want to think about anything that needs per-host configuration and I want to get router/switch/link details in the same tool. 'Getting it running' should be a yum install these days plus configuring a discovery range which you can now do through the web interface. If you have a server for a test install and the same snmp community string everywhere it should be painless to test.
The one thing I find a bit cumbersome is building pages with the graph groupings that I want to see together. It's not a difficult process, just several steps to pick and position each one on a page. But that's just for convenience - you can go to the node page and pick graphs individually without this.
I have to say the WMI capability of Zenoss is a real plus for me and the documentation for Zenoss looks way better than OpenNMS which even they admit on the wiki isn't very good:)
I tried WMI on opennms a while back and couldn't make it work, but I'm sure it is much better now. As for documentation in general, you shouldn't need much to get started and the mail list is pretty good if you have specific questions. In fact I usually look at mail list archives before making choices like this. If people are asking about problems with the basic application functionality I'm less likely to try it than if the discussions are about adding new stuff or extensions.