[nycbug-talk] Statistical Monitoring

[Charles Sprickman]

On Tue, 4 Nov 2008, Jesse Callaway wrote:

> 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'll just second this.  I looked at zenoss and liked the graphing, but I 
already had Nagios, so I upgraded to the latest and added pnp4nagios to 
the mix.  It works extremely well and produces really nice graphs.  They 
look pretty, and they are also on my weekly/monthly checklist - I review 
cpu usage and other trends to see if anything looks odd long-term.  I'm 
very happy with this mix.

Charles

> 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
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