I'm just taking a quick poll on what some of my fellow Sys Admins use for Server/Network monitoring.

I'm specifically looking for some a little simpler than Nagios (not that it's "hard" ...it's just tedious and since some people left...I am a 1 man department for 500+ Systems).

Is there something out there that is easier/faster to configure?

What do you guys use for med-large infrastructure?

Thanks in advance! :-)

--C

Well I think Nagios sucks donkey balls personally. Because it does.

What do you really want to get out of the system? For mid level standalone systems, I've found OpManager from ManageEngine surprisingly good for a commercial product, although I've not been there for a few years now. I also ran OpenNMS for other systems, mainly network devices, although anything using SNMP has a good shot with it. I was slightly impressed with Hyperic too, but never got on board with it.

A very different angle you might be interested in is Splunk. Whilst it started as a log collector, it can now use any generic log input to create very pretty web2.0y live graphs and dashboards, although that's *not* simple to get right as it's so free and flexible.

I'd fight tooth and nail to avoid the "big guys" like BMC etc. buying into a closed monolithic monitoring toolset is worse than buying into Apple!

1 members found this post helpful.

I'd disagree Nagios doe snot suck donkey balls, It's setup does though. I would vote Nagios, however, OpManager is decent as is Solarwinds products. Fins what works best for your environment.

I'd also say avoid solarwinds. I really hated that. Thier massive overhaul a few years ago was just to hack a hole into the side of the legacy NT server gui app to allow a poorly written web interface too. They made a feature out of forcing you to write your own web pages for it. Horrific.

I don't know I demoed some of their stuff recently, seemed decent to me. On a side note I'd also say if you don't need real time monitoring I recommend Spiceworks, though it does far more than monitoring. You do, however, need a windows box to run it on.

Look into Zenoss

But please don't bad mouth Nagios, It's highly flexible and as long as you logically configure your systems it's a piece of cake to use.

Ahh well everyone has the right to say what they think about it. TBH, I have a bit of a personal grudge as so many Linux sysadmins seem to hold Nagios upon high and use it without ever being aware of any alternatives, and never question if it's really fit for purpose or not. Like they picked up the received wisdom many years ago and stopped thinking for themselves.

I agree that blind obedience without question is a failure under most circumstances, but on the same token saying that something "Sucks Donkey Balls" with the only reason of "It's my Opinion or It just does" is equally as bad. We are all adults here i hope or atleast mature members of a community, i don't think a thread full of conjecturebation/anecdata is useful too anyone. I understand everyone has the right to their own opinion, but this was never asked from the OP as he was looking more for facts and comparison metrics. Anyway, i digress.

For the OP, this will help with your comparison http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compari...toring_systems As you can see, Zenoss fairs well.

Zabbix rocks!
</opinion>

Well, I guess UnSpawn had a bad experience at some point.
I've used Nagios and its fine.
Of course as with Linux distros, 'best' is highly subjective and may depend on exactly what you want to achieve.

1 members found this post helpful.

Christ, please don't confuse me with Unspawn. I'm sure he'd be as grateful as I am of that.

Nagios is "fine" certainly. It does what it's meant to. I'm still allowed to hate it.

Ah right; must had a brain fade; obviously I meant you

PS sorry about that

Hey,

Have a look at xymon. Pretty easy to setup, integrated graphing, simple to add new monitors (if you can script that is and has a very active development community.

Cheers

My vote to Nagios,then Splunk.Nagios is more flexible and lots of plugins are available to configure as per our requirement.Personnally hate Opennms ,it sucks and very hard to configure Disk space & Memory threshold alert .