OK, I've had a Zabbix and a Zenoss server running now for 2 or 3 days and
would like to morph this thread into a discussion of what each of these
systems can and cannot do.
At the base of what I see so far, Zabbix is only able to monitor devices
that have the Zabbix agent on it - is that correct?
On the one hand I like having an agent on the remove device since it allows
you to have functionality that is more purpose-driven to what we are trying
to do. On the other hand, what above devices that cannot run the agent?
e.g. monitoring switches and routers. Though to counter my own concern -
those are the sorts of things that are either up or down anyway and I"m not
sure that they can be "monitored" per-se outside of that. Sure you can
graph their traffic and so forth, but is any monitoring software able to
actually say "there is a potential problem with your router or switch"?
Other than "your device is now down" which is pretty easy to figure out
anyway without monitoring software since just about anything connected to
it is going to start throwing alarms once it is down.
Zenoss seems to let you monitor anything via SNMP which may not necessarily
be as purpose-driven as having an agent, but it does allow you to monitor
just about anything under the sun since pretty much everything supports
SNMP. On the upside, getting this ste up has forced me to do some reading
on configuring net-snmp on Linux and I've gotten that working and it could
turn out to be useful elsewhere even if I do not choose Zenoss
As for the dashboard and general web interface, configuring things, viewing
things and so on, both of them seem to be pretty easy to set up and use.
I find the Zabbix interface a little more useful, with better default
graphs and so on.
But I'm still left wondering whether I should fall back to Nagios. One
very nice thing about Nagios is that you can do some really fine-grained
tests on systems to determine whether or not it is currently working. Like
you can log in to an FTP server and test for a specific file or something
like that. You are always testing from the outside which may have its
downsides too, but it has a lot of upsides because that's how users view
the boxes anyway - from the outside.
Do Zabbix or Zenoss allow for this sort of testing that Nagios has?
Incidentally I also looked at OpenNMS which has a live demo online - I
don't like the dashboard and basic functionality as much as Zabbix or
Zenoss. And since I did not set it up myself nor configure it, I cannot
comment on that.
I am also looking at Icinga which is a fork of Nagios but seems to have
gone in a very different direction after the fork. They have a live demo
on their site as well. I have not dug much into this yet so cannot comment
on how I like.
Thoughts form anyone on any of this?
--
“Don't eat anything you've ever seen advertised on TV”
- Michael Pollan, author of "In Defense of Food"