[TriLUG] Remote server monitoring

[Owen Berry]

In terms of an improved interface for Nagios, I recently came across
this product: Oreon (http://www.oreon.org/index-en.html), which is a
derivative of Nagios. I haven't tried to use it, but I would be
interested if anyone else has taken a look.

For me, Nagios is a real powerhouse, but our staff have struggled to
keep the configuration files in order, particularly when it comes to
redundancy and distributed monitoring over multiple sites. Hence my
current task to clean it all up and create an interface for generating
the configuration files.

Owen

On Thu, Sep 01, 2005 at 08:41:29AM -0700, Aaron Joyner wrote:
> Shane O'Donnell wrote:
> 
> >Or use OpenNMS, which already does all of this out of the box.
> >
> >Oh yeah, almost forgot, it also scales better, has a better user
> >interface (from a usability perspective), and can use all of the
> >plugins built for Nagios.
> > 
> >
> 
> Did you mention that it's auto detection (perhaps it's only feature 
> advantage over Nagios) is notoriously prone to slaughter the network 
> (1), and it's implemented entirely in Java (and consumes resources like 
> your average java application, accordingly?)  Also, don't forget to 
> point out that it doesn't understand network topology, and as such will 
> page you for services Y and Z that depend on X, when ever X goes down, 
> because you can't express the dependencies.  I'd definitely debate your 
> usability interface point, as with Nagios' increased understanding of 
> network topologies, it's able to graph the network  in a very clear and 
> understandable manner, which makes blocking outages very fast to 
> understand, and reduces troubleshooting time accordingly.  Not to 
> mention that it is in-and-of-itself a self-documenting diagram of your 
> network, which makes a great teaching aide for new folks on staff, as 
> well as the fact it's the most likely document to be up to date in your 
> entire documentation (as it's auto generated from the monitoring system).
> 
> Have a mentioned enough, or should we continue the holy war?  :)  I can 
> go on for pages...
> Aaron S. Joyner
> 
> 1 - In all fairness, I've never setup OpenNMS.  I've only seen it in 
> use, on networks I've managed.  I've seen it setup by people I don't 
> know, people I know are idiots, and one person who I think is rather 
> knowledgeable.  In all 3 cases I've seen it's auto detection utterly 
> choke OpenSSH's ability to take new incoming connections, by effectively 
> flooding the hosts with connections until the host runs out of 
> resources.  I'd rather not have a "monitoring" daemon that has more than 
> a few times been the source of the problem it's complaining about.  I'll 
> gladly admit the remote possibility that this may have been the fault of 
> 3 separate and unrelated sets of people misconfiguring it in the same 
> way on completely separate occasions.  But if that's the case, that's a 
> design flaw in and of itself.  My solution to the problem usually goes 
> something like this:
> ps ax | grep java | awk '{print $1}' | xargs kill
> but then again I've been called "closed minded" when it comes to java, 
> and I generally consider it a complement.
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