Hi all,
Been using Cacti for monitoring various things like, system disk/mem/ proc, network usage, router usage etc...
While its been fun, the graphs are just unruly.
Was looking an OpsView (the free version), wondering what your experience with this type of trend/heuristic analysis has been and what what you like.
And of course thoughts on OpsView.
- aurf
On Tue, 12 Apr 2011 12:53:41 -0700 aurfalien@gmail.com wrote:
Hi all,
Been using Cacti for monitoring various things like, system disk/mem/ proc, network usage, router usage etc...
While its been fun, the graphs are just unruly.
Was looking an OpsView (the free version), wondering what your experience with this type of trend/heuristic analysis has been and what what you like.
And of course thoughts on OpsView.
My 5 penn'o'rth ...
We looked at a number of monitoring systems before closing on (community version) Opsview. The main other contender we looked at was zenoss - I have to admit I was biased due to previous use of and liking of nagios.
What we liked in Opsview were:
based on nagios - solid pedigree, good technology, our own previous experience, lots of plugins built-in or available, in extremis you can look at the nice ascii configuration files and see what's going on. You also have an escape route to nagios if opsview disappears (but they appear to be thriving AFAIK).
easy to extend to custom tests/monitors using eg ssh scripts
data sets are right in front of you - it would be easy to grab your data and run with it, if you had to (not that I've done much with it, but it's nice to know that your data is not held hostage in some binary silo).
very light feel - I mean it's light on resources both on the testing machine and on the targets. It would probably scale up well (we only monitor about a dozen or so systems).
pointy-click - so there is the (remote) possibility that I could lob this off onto someone else! The graphical i/f is rational - unlike some others eg zenoss which I just couldn't get my poor old head around _at all_!!!
opsview people and community are helpful, positive, approachable etc etc Community project is keenly supported and not just poor-cousin to paid-for product. Just like this newsgroup - if you post a message you're very likely to get someone pipe up with a helpful reply.
As for trending/heuristics - the graphs are good enough for us as-is and the knowledge that you can plug-out a feed to your own datastore/analysis is comforting.
The bad?
nothing really. Well, twist my arm - the web i/f can be a bit ponderous and there's a couple of gotchas that you just have to know about eg you can make all the changes you like, but nothing actually takes effect until you find the configuration page and press the reload button. Also, new monitors need two re-loads before the graphs appear. I'm just mentioning them to illustrate how trivial my gripes are.
Hope this helps ...
Bob
On Apr 12, 2011, at 6:23 PM, Bob Hepple wrote:
On Tue, 12 Apr 2011 12:53:41 -0700 aurfalien@gmail.com wrote:
Hi all,
Been using Cacti for monitoring various things like, system disk/mem/ proc, network usage, router usage etc...
While its been fun, the graphs are just unruly.
Was looking an OpsView (the free version), wondering what your experience with this type of trend/heuristic analysis has been and what what you like.
And of course thoughts on OpsView.
My 5 penn'o'rth ...
We looked at a number of monitoring systems before closing on (community version) Opsview. The main other contender we looked at was zenoss - I have to admit I was biased due to previous use of and liking of nagios.
What we liked in Opsview were:
based on nagios - solid pedigree, good technology, our own previous experience, lots of plugins built-in or available, in extremis you can look at the nice ascii configuration files and see what's going on. You also have an escape route to nagios if opsview disappears (but they appear to be thriving AFAIK).
easy to extend to custom tests/monitors using eg ssh scripts
data sets are right in front of you - it would be easy to grab your data and run with it, if you had to (not that I've done much with it, but it's nice to know that your data is not held hostage in some binary silo).
very light feel - I mean it's light on resources both on the testing machine and on the targets. It would probably scale up well (we only monitor about a dozen or so systems).
pointy-click - so there is the (remote) possibility that I could lob this off onto someone else! The graphical i/f is rational - unlike some others eg zenoss which I just couldn't get my poor old head around _at all_!!!
opsview people and community are helpful, positive, approachable etc etc Community project is keenly supported and not just poor-cousin to paid-for product. Just like this newsgroup - if you post a message you're very likely to get someone pipe up with a helpful reply.
As for trending/heuristics - the graphs are good enough for us as-is and the knowledge that you can plug-out a feed to your own datastore/analysis is comforting.
The bad?
nothing really. Well, twist my arm - the web i/f can be a bit ponderous and there's a couple of gotchas that you just have to know about eg you can make all the changes you like, but nothing actually takes effect until you find the configuration page and press the reload button. Also, new monitors need two re-loads before the graphs appear. I'm just mentioning them to illustrate how trivial my gripes are.
Hope this helps ...
Thanks Bob, great post.
Looking forward to Opsview.
- aurf
On Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 11:23:19AM +1000, Bob Hepple wrote:
We looked at a number of monitoring systems before closing on (community version) Opsview. The main other contender we looked at was zenoss - I have to admit I was biased due to previous use of and liking of nagios.
So, if I already have a working nagios that I like, are there any advantages to Opsview community? I only have about 100 services I monitor, and I doubt it'd grow a huge amount in the near future.
--keith
On Tue, 12 Apr 2011 19:33:34 -0700 Keith Keller kkeller@wombat.san-francisco.ca.us wrote:
On Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 11:23:19AM +1000, Bob Hepple wrote:
We looked at a number of monitoring systems before closing on (community version) Opsview. The main other contender we looked at was zenoss - I have to admit I was biased due to previous use of and liking of nagios.
So, if I already have a working nagios that I like, are there any advantages to Opsview community? I only have about 100 services I monitor, and I doubt it'd grow a huge amount in the near future.
Well, the gui admin interface is appealing to some. Then the integrated graphics. Mostly the stock nagios probes are 1:1 compatible (actually identical) to the Opsview ones.
That said, I haven't ever done a port from nagios to opsview - you might want to take a look at the opsview site and lists for that topic.
Cheers
Bob
Am 13.04.2011 04:33, schrieb Keith Keller:
On Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 11:23:19AM +1000, Bob Hepple wrote:
We looked at a number of monitoring systems before closing on (community version) Opsview. The main other contender we looked at was zenoss - I have to admit I was biased due to previous use of and liking of nagios.
So, if I already have a working nagios that I like, are there any advantages to Opsview community? I only have about 100 services I monitor, and I doubt it'd grow a huge amount in the near future.
You might have a look at the Icinga project (actually a nagios fork) with a much nicer interface, API etc.
Regards, Peter
On Apr 12, 2011, at 7:33 PM, Keith Keller wrote:
On Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 11:23:19AM +1000, Bob Hepple wrote:
We looked at a number of monitoring systems before closing on (community version) Opsview. The main other contender we looked at was zenoss - I have to admit I was biased due to previous use of and liking of nagios.
So, if I already have a working nagios that I like, are there any advantages to Opsview community? I only have about 100 services I monitor, and I doubt it'd grow a huge amount in the near future.
Well, Nagios is more for outage/alerts were I was looking more for trending.
Thats why I was originally using Cacti w/Nagios plugin.
- aurf
On Apr 13, 2011, at 10:48 AM, Joseph L. Casale wrote:
Well, Nagios is more for outage/alerts were I was looking more for trending.
Thats why I was originally using Cacti w/Nagios plugin.
There are plenty of graphing/trending addons for Nagios, I moved to Icinga and use PNP4Nagios with it.
Thats another interesting one, will check it out.
On Wed, 13 Apr 2011, Joseph L. Casale wrote:
Well, Nagios is more for outage/alerts were I was looking more for trending.
Thats why I was originally using Cacti w/Nagios plugin.
There are plenty of graphing/trending addons for Nagios, I moved to Icinga and use PNP4Nagios with it.
I also use PNP4Nagios with nagios. Does all I really need, and it's trivial to setup.
jh
On 4/13/2011 12:39 PM, aurfalien@gmail.com wrote:
We looked at a number of monitoring systems before closing on (community version) Opsview. The main other contender we looked at was zenoss - I have to admit I was biased due to previous use of and liking of nagios.
So, if I already have a working nagios that I like, are there any advantages to Opsview community? I only have about 100 services I monitor, and I doubt it'd grow a huge amount in the near future.
Well, Nagios is more for outage/alerts were I was looking more for trending.
Thats why I was originally using Cacti w/Nagios plugin.
If you find anything that is really good at this, please post the info. I'm trying to do it with OpenNMS, but the problem is that the trends I want to track are always across load balanced/fail over sets of things and the aggregation needs to be done at each sample interval to get it right (i.e. if you fail over between two routers you can't add the peak usage of both over a longer interval and call it a trend). I've ended up exporting most of the data out to other tools for trend analysis.
I'd give ZenOSS a try if I were you.
-----Original Message----- From: centos-bounces@centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces@centos.org] On Behalf Of Les Mikesell Sent: Wednesday, April 13, 2011 1:50 PM To: centos@centos.org Subject: Re: [CentOS] SNMP monitoring options
On 4/13/2011 12:39 PM, aurfalien@gmail.com wrote:
We looked at a number of monitoring systems before closing on (community version) Opsview. The main other contender we looked at was zenoss - I have to admit I was biased due to previous use of and liking of nagios.
So, if I already have a working nagios that I like, are there any advantages to Opsview community? I only have about 100 services I monitor, and I doubt it'd grow a huge amount in the near future.
Well, Nagios is more for outage/alerts were I was looking more for trending.
Thats why I was originally using Cacti w/Nagios plugin.
If you find anything that is really good at this, please post the info. I'm trying to do it with OpenNMS, but the problem is that the trends I
want to track are always across load balanced/fail over sets of things and the aggregation needs to be done at each sample interval to get it right (i.e. if you fail over between two routers you can't add the peak usage of both over a longer interval and call it a trend). I've ended up
exporting most of the data out to other tools for trend analysis.
On Apr 13, 2011, at 10:50 AM, Les Mikesell wrote:
On 4/13/2011 12:39 PM, aurfalien@gmail.com wrote:
We looked at a number of monitoring systems before closing on (community version) Opsview. The main other contender we looked at was zenoss - I have to admit I was biased due to previous use of and liking of nagios.
So, if I already have a working nagios that I like, are there any advantages to Opsview community? I only have about 100 services I monitor, and I doubt it'd grow a huge amount in the near future.
Well, Nagios is more for outage/alerts were I was looking more for trending.
Thats why I was originally using Cacti w/Nagios plugin.
If you find anything that is really good at this, please post the info.
Will do, sounds like I'm doing a bake off of SNMP trending tools :)
I'll post screen shots.
- aurf
On 4/13/2011 12:52 PM, aurfalien@gmail.com wrote:
Well, Nagios is more for outage/alerts were I was looking more for trending.
Thats why I was originally using Cacti w/Nagios plugin.
If you find anything that is really good at this, please post the info.
Will do, sounds like I'm doing a bake off of SNMP trending tools :)
The thing I'm particularly interested in is a way to aggregate values across fairly dynamic groups: total interface traffic across a set of routers or switch ports, tcp connection counts across a set of host interfaces, etc. And I want to track the history of the aggregate trend for the groups even when the members come and go and the numbers in the group vary. Most of the things I've seen so far only deal with individual entities and if they understand groups at all, they don't maintain the history of the aggregated values when the members change.
On Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 10:39:17AM -0700, aurfalien@gmail.com wrote:
On Apr 12, 2011, at 7:33 PM, Keith Keller wrote:
On Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 11:23:19AM +1000, Bob Hepple wrote:
We looked at a number of monitoring systems before closing on (community version) Opsview. The main other contender we looked at was zenoss - I have to admit I was biased due to previous use of and liking of nagios.
So, if I already have a working nagios that I like, are there any advantages to Opsview community? I only have about 100 services I monitor, and I doubt it'd grow a huge amount in the near future.
Well, Nagios is more for outage/alerts were I was looking more for trending.
Thats why I was originally using Cacti w/Nagios plugin.
I haven't been following this thread, so I may be on the wrong track, but have you checked out something called 'rrdtool' and its pal 'mrtg'?
See: http://www.mrtg.org/rrdtool/
At least their intention is to help you reveal trends in various lengths of time and almost any metric you come up with. I believe some people have already worked out using it with snmp, at least for some things.
////jerry
- aurf
CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
On Apr 13, 2011, at 12:28 PM, Jerry McAllister wrote:
On Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 10:39:17AM -0700, aurfalien@gmail.com wrote:
On Apr 12, 2011, at 7:33 PM, Keith Keller wrote:
On Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 11:23:19AM +1000, Bob Hepple wrote:
We looked at a number of monitoring systems before closing on (community version) Opsview. The main other contender we looked at was zenoss - I have to admit I was biased due to previous use of and liking of nagios.
So, if I already have a working nagios that I like, are there any advantages to Opsview community? I only have about 100 services I monitor, and I doubt it'd grow a huge amount in the near future.
Well, Nagios is more for outage/alerts were I was looking more for trending.
Thats why I was originally using Cacti w/Nagios plugin.
I haven't been following this thread, so I may be on the wrong track, but have you checked out something called 'rrdtool' and its pal 'mrtg'?
See: http://www.mrtg.org/rrdtool/
At least their intention is to help you reveal trends in various lengths of time and almost any metric you come up with. I believe some people have already worked out using it with snmp, at least for some things.
////jerry
Hi Jerry,
So nice of you to chime in.
Ummm, Cacti and I'm sure Opsview use rrdtool to generate there graphs.
In fact, my post was to ask for a more friendly tool as Cacti graphs get un ruley.
- aurf
----- Original Message -----
On Apr 13, 2011, at 12:28 PM, Jerry McAllister wrote:
On Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 10:39:17AM -0700, aurfalien@gmail.com wrote:
On Apr 12, 2011, at 7:33 PM, Keith Keller wrote:
On Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 11:23:19AM +1000, Bob Hepple wrote:
We looked at a number of monitoring systems before closing on (community version) Opsview. The main other contender we looked at was zenoss - I have to admit I was biased due to previous use of and liking of nagios.
So, if I already have a working nagios that I like, are there any advantages to Opsview community? I only have about 100 services I monitor, and I doubt it'd grow a huge amount in the near future.
Well, Nagios is more for outage/alerts were I was looking more for trending.
Thats why I was originally using Cacti w/Nagios plugin.
I haven't been following this thread, so I may be on the wrong track, but have you checked out something called 'rrdtool' and its pal 'mrtg'?
See: http://www.mrtg.org/rrdtool/
At least their intention is to help you reveal trends in various lengths of time and almost any metric you come up with. I believe some people have already worked out using it with snmp, at least for some things.
////jerry
Hi Jerry,
So nice of you to chime in.
Ummm, Cacti and I'm sure Opsview use rrdtool to generate there graphs.
In fact, my post was to ask for a more friendly tool as Cacti graphs get un ruley.
Have a look at Zabbix [1]. It's fantastic with both alerting *AND* trending. Plus, the data is malleable into other forms for custom reporting, etc.
The only issue I've found thus far is *current* documentation is quite lacking. The best reference I've found is a third party book available from Packt. [2]
--Tim
[1] http://www.zabbix.com [2] http://www.packtpub.com/zabbix-1-8-network-monitoring/book
On Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 12:37:28PM -0700, aurfalien@gmail.com wrote:
On Apr 13, 2011, at 12:28 PM, Jerry McAllister wrote:
So, if I already have a working nagios that I like, are there any advantages to Opsview community? I only have about 100 services I monitor, and I doubt it'd grow a huge amount in the near future.
Well, Nagios is more for outage/alerts were I was looking more for trending.
Thats why I was originally using Cacti w/Nagios plugin.
I haven't been following this thread, so I may be on the wrong track, but have you checked out something called 'rrdtool' and its pal 'mrtg'?
See: http://www.mrtg.org/rrdtool/
At least their intention is to help you reveal trends in various lengths of time and almost any metric you come up with. I believe some people have already worked out using it with snmp, at least for some things.
////jerry
Hi Jerry,
So nice of you to chime in.
Ummm, Cacti and I'm sure Opsview use rrdtool to generate there graphs.
In fact, my post was to ask for a more friendly tool as Cacti graphs get un ruley.
Oh. OK. As I indicated, I haven't been following, just dived in the middle. I have not used Cacti or Opsview, but am just starting to learn rrdtool by itself.
////jerry
- aurf
CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
On 4/13/2011 3:01 PM, Jerry McAllister wrote:
Oh. OK. As I indicated, I haven't been following, just dived in the middle. I have not used Cacti or Opsview, but am just starting to learn rrdtool by itself.
Pretty much all of the packages that collect values and graph them use rrdtool as a component to store and graph the time-series data. OpenNMS has a pure-java alternative called jrobin that is theoretically more effecient as its default, but it can also be configured to use rrd if you want.
On Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 12:37:28PM -0700, aurfalien@gmail.com wrote:
Ummm, Cacti and I'm sure Opsview use rrdtool to generate there graphs.
In fact, my post was to ask for a more friendly tool as Cacti graphs get un ruley.
'Unruly' graphs? Not sure what you mean. The data presentation is poor? The package is hard to use? I'm a Cacti user, and while sometimes the docs are a little cryptic, the developers are very supportive and there is an active user community with a pretty helpful forum.
On 4/12/11 2:53 PM, aurfalien@gmail.com wrote:
Hi all,
Been using Cacti for monitoring various things like, system disk/mem/ proc, network usage, router usage etc...
While its been fun, the graphs are just unruly.
Was looking an OpsView (the free version), wondering what your experience with this type of trend/heuristic analysis has been and what what you like.
And of course thoughts on OpsView.
Can't really comment on OpsView but I'd recommend looking at OpenNMS too.
On Apr 12, 2011, at 6:42 PM, Les Mikesell wrote:
On 4/12/11 2:53 PM, aurfalien@gmail.com wrote:
Hi all,
Been using Cacti for monitoring various things like, system disk/mem/ proc, network usage, router usage etc...
While its been fun, the graphs are just unruly.
Was looking an OpsView (the free version), wondering what your experience with this type of trend/heuristic analysis has been and what what you like.
And of course thoughts on OpsView.
Can't really comment on OpsView but I'd recommend looking at OpenNMS too.
Will do Les.
Thanks.
- aurf
-
aurfalien＠gmail.com -
Baird, Josh -
Bob Hepple -
Charles Polisher -
Jerry McAllister -
John Hodrien -
Joseph L. Casale -
Keith Keller -
Les Mikesell -
Peter Hinse -
Tim Nelson