[nycbug-talk] Monitoring programs

[Charles Sprickman]

On Fri, 19 Aug 2005, pete wright wrote:

> On 8/19/05, Francisco Reyes <lists at natserv.com> wrote:
>>
>> 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).

Hmmm...  Are you somehow using your nagios configs to generate cricket 
configs?  I've been looking for an *easy* way to graph everything that 
nagios monitors.

> 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.

I'll second Nagios.  It is hard to setup, but so is every other app - you 
do somehow have to get all the devices and services into any system, and 
that's always a pain.  I toyed with Zabbix for a little while and even 
though it had a web frontend for configuration, that seemed more tedious 
than editing nagios config files.  I ended up doing most of my host checks 
with snmp, as that seemed the easiest after also using check_by_ssh and 
nrpe, YMMV.  net-snmp is pretty easy to "extend" - I made a few snmp 
checks that deal with qmail (out of the box net-snmp can give sendmail 
info).  There's even an snmp mib you can walk that shows you all installed 
ports and their versions, that was kind of a surprise.

> 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.

The only thing right now that's really got me worried about Nagios is that 
the latest version (2.x branch, which is what's in the ports tree now) 
does not play well with FreeBSD's thread library (4.x or 5.x) and I've had 
little success in getting Ethan to interface with a few helpful people on 
-hackers.  To me, it looks like Nagios is not doing something correctly 
with threads based on the responses I saw on -hackers.  On the Nagios 
devel list people just suggest running Linux to "fix" it.  So that's all a 
little dicey.  I hate seeing software go from "it runs on unix" to "runs 
best on linux" for no good reason.

Charles

> -p
>
>
> -- 
> ~~o0OO0o~~
> Pete Wright
> www.nycbug.org <http://www.nycbug.org>
> NYC's *BSD User Group
>