[CentOS] Migrating away from Nagios

Fri Jun 18 18:39:53 UTC 2010
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

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.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com