[BBLISA] GPL system monitoring tools? (alternatives to nagios)

[John P. Rouillard]

In message <7A3E41CFC71C724689591F5373DE4CCB25EAC9 at wsmail2k.winsor.edu>,
"Scott Nixon" writes:
>We have been looking at OpenNMS(opennms.org). It is developed full time
>by the OpenNMS Group(opennms.com). It was designed from the ground up to
>be an Enterprise class monitoring solution. If your interested, I'd
>suggest listening to this podcast with the *manager* of OpenNMS Tarus
>Balog (http://www.twit.tv/floss15).

I talked with Mr. Balog at the 2004 LISA IIRC. The big thing that
makes opennms a non-starter for me was the inability to create
dependencies between services. It's a pain to do in nagios but it's
there and that is a critical tools for enterprise level operations.
A fast perusal of the OpenNMS docs doesn't show that feature.

Compared to nagios the OpenNMS docs seem weak.

Also at the time all service monitors had to be written in java. I
think there were plans to make a shell connector that would allow you
to run any program and feed it's output back to OpenNMS. That means
all the nagios plugins could be used with a suitable shell wrapper.

OpenNMS had a much nicer web interface and better access control
IIRC. But at the time I don't think you could schedule downtime in the
web interface. Alo I just looked at the demo and didn't see it (but
that may be because it's a demo).

On the nice side, having multiple operational problem levels (5/6
IIRC) rather then nagios's 3: ok, warning, and critical was something
I wished Nagios had.

Also the ability to annotate the events with more info than nagios
allows was a win, but something similar could be done in nagios.

I liked it it just didn't provide the higher level functionality that
we needed.

				-- rouilj
John Rouillard
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