On Apr 12, 2011, at 6:23 PM, Bob Hepple wrote: > 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 ... Thanks Bob, great post. Looking forward to Opsview. - aurf