[CentOS] SNMP monitoring options

Wed Apr 13 01:23:19 UTC 2011
Bob Hepple <bhepple at promptu.com>

On Tue, 12 Apr 2011 12:53:41 -0700
aurfalien at 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

-- 
Bob Hepple <bhepple at promptu.com>
ph: 07-5584-5908 Fx: 07-5575-9550