[nycbug-talk] Statistical Monitoring

[pete]

On Tue, 4 Nov 2008 11:28:22 -0500 (EST), Matt Juszczak <matt at atopia.net>
wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> What do all of you use for monitoring now-n-days?  In the past I've used
a 
> combination of Nagios and Cacti, but I've setup Nagios on a new setup,
and 
> while investigating Cacti (via SNMP) I also began investigating Ganglia.
> 
> What do all of you prefer - push methods or pull methods for statistics 
> gathering and graphing?  It seems using Cacti with SNMP would work
nicely, 
> but also using Ganglia to push the data to a centralized gmond (which 
> I've also done in the past) works well, too.
> 
> Thoughts?
> 

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.

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.

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:

http://www.zenoss.com/

HTH,
-pete

-- 
Pete Wright
pete at nomadlogic.org
310.869.9459