[nycbug-talk] Monitoring programs

[Bob Ippolito]

On Aug 19, 2005, at 10:51 AM, pete wright wrote:

> On 8/19/05, Francisco Reyes <lists at natserv.com> wrote:
> Going through the ports see a whole batch of monitoring packages. Any
> recommendations?
>
> In particular looking to monitor disk, memory and a couple of  
> directories.
>
> So far I see on ports
> cfgstoragemk-1.0_1
> MRTG configuration generator for storage monitoring via SNMP
>
> cricket-1.0.5_1
> A high performance, extremely flexible monitoring system
>
> works well for us here, we track a considerable amount of services  
> with cricket (we tie it into our nagios setup).
>
> nagios-1.2_2,1
> Extremely powerful network monitoring system
>
>
> also quite good, although frankly the configuration system can turn  
> into a mess for a large number of systems.  I would suggest getting  
> a perl/DB front end for it.  we monitor a *huge* amount of machines  
> with nagios and aside from having to edit some header files to  
> accomidate our hosts it runs pretty great.
>
> In my experience nagios seems to be the most flexible and robust  
> solution going, it can be a pain to configure but by the same token  
> you can get it to do alot of different things (SNMP checks,  
> scripts, etc..).  For the type of checks you want to run, this may  
> be your best bet as most of those checks already exist or are  
> online as plugins.

Nagios seems to work well, but it's the worst piece of garbage I've  
ever put into production.  The configuration language is custom,  
verbose, ill documented, and brain damaged.  The web interface is mad  
oldschool and ugly.  I haven't looked at the code, but I suspect that  
I probably wouldn't have been able to deploy it in good conscience if  
I had (the Wordpress dilemma).

However, I haven't seen anything better, so I second that Nagios  
recommendation.  Just set aside a day or two to edit configuration  
files.  Unless you're using something to generate Nagios  
configuration files, expect to be writing at least 60 lines of  
configuration across three or four different files for each host.

-bob

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