[TriLUG] Jihad! ( was Remote server monitoring)

[Tarus Balog]

On Sep 1, 2005, at 11:41 AM, Aaron Joyner wrote:

> Did you mention that it's auto detection (perhaps it's only feature  
> advantage over Nagios) is notoriously prone to slaughter the network

Wrong. At LinuxWorld I discovered a whole Class B, 25K active servers  
and 50K services, without "slaughtering" the network. OpenNMS is  
extremely configurable, and you can make discovery as nice or as  
vicious as you would like. OpenNMS is a tool - a powerful tool. If  
someone uses a chainsaw to tear up a couple of people, you can't just  
assume that in the hands of a lumberjack it wouldn't be useful tool  
for cutting up trees. It would have been nice in your "notorious"  
claim to cite a reference or two. Notoriety implies experience  
outside of your own.

> and it's implemented entirely in Java (and consumes resources like  
> your average java application, accordingly?)

As someone who has never setup OpenNMS, this seems to be more of an  
"I hate Java" rant than anything to do with OpenNMS. I run OpenNMS on  
a small file server running various web pages and mail services and  
the system's load is rarely above 0.2. Then again, we have a huge  
system in Geneva monitoring 80K devices that is constantly busy.

>   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.

Don't you have to set up those dependencies manually? How do you do  
that on a 80K node network? Plus, in 1.3.0 or 1.3.1 we'll introduce  
Linkd, which will do both topology and mapping. At Dev-Jam 2005 the  
plan is to include AJAX in the webUI so that our maps will act more  
like Google maps. Give us until the end of the year and this argument  
goes away.

>
> Have a mentioned enough, or should we continue the holy war?  :)  I  
> can go on for pages...
> Aaron S. Joyner

So can I, but outside of topology it doesn't seem like you know what  
you are talking about with respect to OpenNMS. Plus, since OpenNMS  
1.3.0 supports NRPE, almost every bit of data available to Nagios is  
available to OpenNMS.

You said "[Nagios] It be the best.  Tie in MRTG or better yet your  
own RRDtool back end for historical monitoring, and layer on  
smokeping for good latency measurements if you need them." Shane's  
point was that OpenNMS does service monitoring, like Nagios, latency,  
like smokeping, data collection, like MRTG, as well as event  
management and notifications like no other app out there. It does it  
without "double polling" (SNMP data can generate threshold events and  
reports without having a separate process for each) and it actually  
has a database in which network information can be stored, versus log  
files.

When you use loaded language like "notoriously" and "slaughter" you  
are definitely trolling for flame.

-T

-----

Tarus Balog
The OpenNMS Group, Inc.
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