On Wed, 2009-04-22 at 17:50 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote: > I am interested in a comparison with Zenoss - but wait until you know > your way around opennms. Just ask on the opennms list if it doesn't do > something you expect. ---- admittedly, this analysis is less than 24 hours after installation but... Zenoss and OpenNMS seem to be scratching similar but different itches. OpenNMS seems to be most useful to large businesses with many remote sites and configuration management (i.e. puppet) of things like managed switches and sophisticated assignment to users/groups for alarms, etc. At this stage, I am only employing snmp for data collection and not for 'write' purposes. Zenoss seems much more adept at gathering specific information on each device (at least out of the box adept), and it makes it easy for me for an example, to see who has which version of Microsoft Office installed on their computers. It does have alarm/event assignment and multiple method of notification assignment options, probably not quite as comprehensive as OpenNMS but still more than adequate for my uses. One thing that I have come to appreciate about Zenoss is that in addition to having SNMP and WMI data collectors, it also supports SSH collection which as I said, the Macintosh systems (workstations, i.e. iMacs, PowerMac G5, PowerMac Pro) don't seem to provide much useful info via SNMP. My usage is typically a small business (< 50 users/computers) and I am pretty certain that Zenoss is more useful to me but I am still playing with OpenNMS anyway just to satisfy my curiosity and it has been educational for sure. It would be hard for me to compare the process of setting both of them up because I already had Sun JDK working, snmp working on all possible devices and my understanding was relatively poor the first time I installed Zenoss. Subsequent installation has been relatively easy and OpenNMS was very easy too but by then, I had pretty a pretty good knowledge of things. Zenoss has a 'stack-installer' which will bundle mysql, python and zenoss, not really necessary on CentOS-5 which you can use CentOS supplied python and mysql-server. Their 'stack-installer' runs mysql-server on port 3307. I installed it by accident on one network and it's running fine so I left it alone. Zenoss has cool feature of automatically upgrading database when you upgrade versions unless you (speaking from experience) jump major versions (i.e. 2.0 => 2.2). You must upgrade to 2.1, start it up, allow it to convert the database, shut it down, upgrade it to 2.2 and repeat. Zenoss is now on version 2.3 which is substantially faster than earlier versions (I don't know why but I like). I prefer the selection/assignment methods of 'discovered' nodes (zenoss calls them devices, opennms calls them nodes) in Zenoss but that is sort of quibbling and not entirely important. Zenoss also has more 'built-in' categorizations (Location, Group, Network and even the 'Device' category seems to have unlimited subgroup options which I find entirely useful). It is a lot simpler to look at a Device list in Zenoss, select the Devices you want and assign them to a category than the selection/assignment method in OpenNMS=>Admin. Thanks Craig -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.