[nycbug-talk] Statistical Monitoring

[Matt Juszczak]

> while i would not say that nagios is the best thing out there - i was
> actually quite happy with nagios v3 after moving off of v1 and v2.  you can
> relay alerts from one nagios installation to another (i.e. forward alerts
> from one DC/office to your NOC) which was helpful for us.  it's pretty easy
> to write custom alerts if you need to (we usually let our middleware
> developers write alerts in their language of choice perl/python/ruby/etc.)
> if their code that has to be monitored is not snmp friendly.

I believe there are two different types of monitoring: one for alerts 
(pulling real-time statistics and alerting based on those statistics), and 
one to calculate things over time (storing statistics for graphic, etc.). 
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like some people use one without the 
other, and vice versa.

I already have nagios setup (its pulling data mostly by connecting via 
TCP/IP, and for local checks its (for now) polling via check_by_ssh).  I'd 
eventually like to replace the check_by_ssh checks with SNMP for disk 
usage, CPU, etc.

> cacti is pretty nice for trending i have found, and it seems quite flexible
> too.  the stock php snmp agent is crap for anything more than a couple
> network nodes - but they do have a compiled C poller as well.  the UI is
> great for management types too i have found.

Cacti is really only for polling via SNMP though, am I correct?  And its a 
pull system only, right?

> we did look into Zenoss as well - but we had alot of time and effort
> invested in our existing nagios alerts so we did not go that route.  having
> said that, it does look like it could be a nice package combining trending
> and alerts:

Ah, I see =) The answer I was looking for before!  But I've already setup 
nagios, so at this point, I'm looking for something to use for trending 
only.