[nycbug-talk] Statistical Monitoring

[Jesse Callaway]

On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 11:28 AM, 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?
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I'm running Nagios + pnp4nagios which takes the extra data that the
nagios service checks picks up and makes RRD/Cacti graphs out of them.
I did this to reduce the amount of polling which can skew results, and
soaks up resources for those times when you really need the graphs.
Also it's all wrapped up in one place to maintain.
I'm scared of SNMP security-wise, but that may be because I don't know
enough about it.
Pull methods have the advantage of allowing for failover/redundant
monitoring servers. Push methods can be easier on the firewall.

-jesse