[TriLUG] Jihad! ( was Remote server monitoring)

[John Turner]

If you haven't looked at Hobbit (based on ideas of Big Brother)  
please take a look
http://hobbitmon.sourceforge.net/
It was written by the guy who did bbgen (add on to BB that most  
people used).

Hobbit/BB uses push from the clients not SNMP so it should be  
possible to work in your case. Most of the BB add-ons work and there  
are many.

John

On Sep 1, 2005, at 12:14 PM, William Sutton wrote:

> I'd like to introduce a scenario and inquire as to how
> OpenNMS/Nagios/Big Brother/et. al. handle it.
>
> You have a server (or servers) where network connectivity can be  
> spotty.
> You need to track CPU usage, memory usage, active processes for up/ 
> down
> status, etc.
>
> If I understand how these systems operate, then they won't be able  
> to poll
> the server (or servers) if the network connectivity is missing  
> (e.g., no
> knowledge of what happened, and no history).
>
> Please correct me if I'm wrong.
>
> It seems like a more sensible alternative to polling is to have  
> separate
> tools for monitoring and data collection/reporting:  Place the  
> monitor on
> the servers, and allow them to queue up reports in event of network
> problems.
>
> Thoughts?  Responses?
>
> William
>
>
> On Thu, 1 Sep 2005, Tarus Balog wrote:
>
>
>>
>> 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.
>> Main  : +1 919 545 2553   Fax:   +1 503-961-7746
>> Direct: +1 919 647 4749   Skype: tarusb
>> Key Fingerprint: 8945 8521 9771 FEC9 5481  512B FECA 11D2 FD82 B45C
>>
>>
>>
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