Check this out
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network...ing_comparison
http://www.centreon.com/Product/Centreon.html

Finally settled for zenoss to enjoy the best of both worlds (opennms and nagios). Note that you can also use your nagios plugins with zenoss.

My experience with Zenoss left a bad taste in my mouth. It's still very immature, buggy, unreliable and I really didn't like how it handled monitoring, configuration and so on overall.

It performed poorly when a catastrophic event occurred, instead of notifying that a whole network is down where you don't need each individual host sending their own notifications as well, each individual host will still send such notifications.

I really hated how it would pick up changes for hosts, how it would scan everything you have to be monitored at set intervals and if you wanted to scan for the changes, it didn't always pick up the changes on the particular host.

I also hate when it scanned, if you had a host running mysql that it monitored before and it wasn't running the next scan to make the updates, it would stop monitoring that process cause it wasn't running at the time of the scan.

It wouldn't pick up new processes to monitor on hosts that clearly were running the process at times, having to perform several scans to get picked up.

The only plus I think it had was a pretty user interface.

Maybe it's matured since last time I used it but OpenNMS is still superior in my opinion. And you can use Nagios plugins and scripts with it as well.

What application would be best for enterprise level monitoring is highly dependent upon the specifics of your network and what is being monitored. Are you monitoring locally or remotely? Do you monitor via ssh or snmp? Do you need room for future expansion with non-unix clients? What kind of notifications do you want? Do you want your information stored in database form or flat text? etc.

I've personally used at one point or another at least half a dozen different systems for monitoring with good results, I would recommend any of the following:

Nagios
SNIPS/NOCOL
Zenoss
OpenNMS

That being said, you need to know exactly what you're looking for in a monitoring package before you decide on one. Everyone has their favorites and they all are roughly capable of monitoring everything under the sun given adequate time for learning their peculiarities and a willingness to occasionally add code yourself.

Hi:

I am an SA and I am looking for a Unix/Linux system monitoring tool to monitor the following OS (no network devices). There are about 1600 servers.

Solaris 2.8, 10 including LDOM and non-globalzones
RHEL 4, 5 on standalone and VMware instances
AIX 5.X, 6.X including LPAR

From the feedback of this thread, I am thinking about using Nagios or Zabbix.

I also need the following features.

1) server configuration collection such as configuration files and command output.
2) pattern matching in log files.
3) package installation analysis.

Could anyone tell me which tool is better for my needs? I would appreciate if you share your experience with me.

Thanks.

It sounds like you need a NMS combined with a configuration management system such as cfengine or Puppet. You could always write plug-ins for your chosen NMS to monitor logs, but you might want to look at implementing something like swatch on a central log server. I've been giving this some thought for my environment.

It's fortuitous this thread got resurrected. I've been a long-time Nagios user, however my set-up has fallen into some disarray and I'm looking at either upgrading to a new version of Nagios & starting from scratch, or switching to different software. So far I've looked at Zabbix and Cacti, and based on this thread I plan to look at OpenNMS as well. In my environment I have a number of critical web, application, and storage servers (probably around 30 total) and then several hundred cluster nodes. One thing I need to be able to do is prioritize alerts -- if a cluster node goes down, that's not such a big deal, but if an application server does I need to know about it ASAP. The problem with Nagios is I would get deluged with mails about minor problems (something I wanted to know about, but was not time-critical). I never found a good way to prioritize alerts. Are any of the other NMS systems better at this? Or did I miss something in how I set up Nagios?

1 members found this post helpful.

Miller:
Thanks.
About the alerting features for Nagios and Zabbix, I once found one link last week indicating that Nagios is more plain in alerting feature. On the contrary, Zabbix could fine tune the alerting function so user won't be flooded by minor warnings. If I found that link. I will let you know.

Thank.

Everything else is a subset of Zenoss

This is quite popular http://www.groundworkopensource.com/...ios-users.html which is a product based on Nagios, but a lot of stuff already done for you.

Hi:
Could you tell me which of them is good at generating reports for packages installed on the servers. I hope that those software have existing functions for that to let me customize the reports for packages.

Thanks.

I hope by now you surely takeback ALL of you negatives here. In my opinion (and experience) all that is said here is now a matter of configuration. Zenoss is VERY flexible and dont get nisled by thinking default behaviour is the standard or "fixed" behaviour, you can always tailor your config to suit your requirements. As a hint, following keywords provide vast info on this (routes, locking, transforms)

Note that you can do everything that can be done by any other monitoring app, and much more on top of that.