[CentOS] Migrating away from Nagios

[Karanbir Singh]

On 06/19/2010 09:39 AM, Rajagopal Swaminathan wrote:
> It is very responsive. in forums, mailing lists, bugzilla, etc.
>

I can offer some insight into this.

We recently moved a 150 node network from cacti / nagios / monit to 
Zabbix; Its been an exceptional mixed bag. The API is extremely basic, 
and does not work as documented - a fact that the developers are aware 
of but dont seem keen on moving it forward. Which has the affect that 
everything on the management side ends up being point and click on a web 
interface ~ massive waste of time and counter productive. Not being able 
to version control the config changes brings back memories of 1990's! 
Secondly, there are very fundamental issues in zabbix, like not being 
able to run counters for high throughput network interfaces. And not 
being very efficient with its data store ( 150 machines of ours are 
generating 230MB of data per day. We are expecting to turn the year with 
over 130GB of data in the mysql db. At which point we go back into only 
storing trend data. Then there is the manic process of creating active 
tests and inter machine or location dependencies.

Just to be clear - I'm not saying its a bad system; its usable  and easy 
to deploy. There are places where it will fit in well,specially if you 
have a small client load ( maybe 40 machine instances or less ). If you 
don't like running client side agents, pass on zabbix.

btw, we considered moving to zabbix for *.centos.org as well and did an 
evaluation in Apr 2009 and it just did not scale up for us. On the other 
hand the Fedora infrastructure guys are running it. And from what I 
hear, they are quite happy with things.

- KB