Come on Nagios all the way! they had over 800,000 downloads from source forge alone. And they have won this pole 3 years running

Zenoss

+1!

Aren't you glad I lobbied Jeremy to add it last year ;-P

@moderators
Why am I not able to look at the results

Xcuse me
Ignore above post. I figured it out :-)
The result is not out.

Zabbix is the new Nagios, which is the new MRTG, which is the new ping

+1 for Zenoss.

It can integrate any Nagios monitor, and got a brand new AJAX UI.

Nagios is awsome and so noob friendly. Cacti is also great just a pain in the but if you don't know what your doing. But cacti should be an option imo

Zenoss is the one for me.

I use Zenoss and have recommended it to many people. I chose Zenoss originally because of the agentless monitoring, and that has only gotten better with each release. The community is one of the most active OSS communities I've participated in, and the company actively works with the community. Even when some community Zenpacks compete with their commercial offerings, they promote and post and host the free competing zenpacks. Icing on the cake was the ability to just "plug in" nagios plugins so it was like getting two NMSs in one box!

Another big reason I set up and continue to use Zenoss is the Windows monitoring capability, without needing me to install yet another agent on all my systems. While everyone does SNMP, few did WMI entirely from the Linux server (i.e. didn't need an intermediary Windows WMI proxy server) back when I was setting this up.

If you haven't looked at Zenoss because there's a commercial version, this information might change your mind:
1) Zenoss Core is the same in the commercial version - the commercial version adds Zenpacks, it doesn't change the basic product you're using. So you're not getting a different app in the open source version.
2) Pretty much anything in the commercial version can be added to the open source version with coding effort on the part of the community. Some examples where that has been done in the WMI zenpacks and the Distributed Collector zenpacks.

Zenoss Enterprise best solution for phyical, virtual and cloud.

Definitely OpenNMS. Of course it does SNMP (both data collection and traps) as well as 100% native WMI with no extra proxy or agent required.

If you haven't looked at OpenNMS because you're enamored of a platform made by a VC-backed proprietary software company that fancies itself a competitor because the "core" of their platform is licensed under the GPL, this information might change your mind:

1) OpenNMS is 100% free and open-source software. We don't have to mislead people about which parts are and aren't free as in freedom (FaiF) because the maintaining company does not make any proprietary add-ons. So you're getting exactly what we advertise: the world's first open-source, enterprise-grade network management application platform.

2a) Pretty much any capability in any proprietary network management platform can be added to OpenNMS with coding effort on the part of the community. Some examples where that has been done include the JMX collector, the WMI collector, the NSClient collector, the XMP collector, the JDBC monitors, the NRPE monitor, the SVG-based topology map, in-line thresholding, the ReST web service API, statistics reports, the new JasperReports reporting framework, and the syslog event receiver.

2b) When a client hires The OpenNMS Group to create a new feature, that client pays one time for the work to get done. The code goes into the main FaiF GPL codebase (the only OpenNMS codebase, actually) for everybody to use for all time at no cost. Some examples where that has been done include surveillance views, the OpenLayers-based (i.e. works with Google, Yahoo!, Mapquest, OpenStreetMap, and others) geographical distributed map, the helpdesk plugin system, the mobile wireless monitoring features, the HTTP collector, remote pollers, path outage suppression, and on-call duty schedules.

3) You can get support for OpenNMS that costs the same regardless of how much stuff you're monitoring. The pricing tiers are based on response-time SLA, coverage hours, and the number of people on your staff who can create tickets. You don't get any extra functionality, just support from a team of professionals who are fanatical about their clients' success. An overwhelming majority of clients have also reported* an increase in their intelligence and level of attractiveness to members of their preferred gender.

*US Food and Drug Administration mandated disclaimer: this product is not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure any disease.

Welcome to LQ! I would like to take this opportunity obo everyone here who [might] share my enthusiasm for you having joined

I noted that this was your first post and even though it is a shameless plug, I hope you'll come back and spend some time asking or helping with questions.

OpenNMS is a great enterprise solution. I started off w/MRTG, and then got kinda hookedon Nagios, but now, as you point out, all these VC backed efforts are beginning to look a little Redmond, IMO.

Even with community editions, many of these are [not quite] crippleware with a huge incentive to purchase the non-free verions through the VC.

Good to see that not all solutions out there are funded in such a manner, and even though I've been working w/Zabbix almost exclusively a/o late, I'm sure to make some time for OpenNMS here in the near future again!

Kindest regards,

Not so much of a "shameless plug" but more of an actually informative post. I lobbied for OpenNMS last year (or was it year before???) and get bored repeating myself so have not elaborated much on it this year, but OpenNMS is hands down, the cream of the crop here - and the more nodes you've got deployed the more apparent it becomes.

What I find is that Java based anything tends to take a bit more knowledge and work to get set up, so tends to put off less seasoned admins from exploring said offerings. However, like emacs, once you get to grips with some basics, the time investment pays back in spades.

While I'm heavily invested in Zenoss at this point (and really have no need for change), the above post has convinced me that whenever there is a review of NMS systems, I'll have to carefully compare the current Zenoss vs the current OpenNMS. My above post was based on the research I had done several years ago - and I may not have been as clear on that as I was trying not to digress. I'm sure the various products are much better now than 3 years ago. Zenoss certainly is, and I don't expect the competitors haven't kept up.

My main take away from this so far is that there's really no reason to consider using really lower level NMS like ping only tools or even perhaps nagios by itself, and spiceworks etc still seem like a waste of time.

I don't want to seem like a shameless plug sort of person with the first post, but this is a "talk up your NMS" thread.

While I was invited to join this thread by the Zenoss community, I've got plenty of other Linux "stuff" I'll likely be looking to post about.