comparison

Marc Powell marc at ena.com
Mon Jan 10 21:58:35 CET 2005



> -----Original Message-----
> From: nagios-users-admin at lists.sourceforge.net [mailto:nagios-users-
> admin at lists.sourceforge.net] On Behalf Of Yates, George D, GVSOL
> Sent: Monday, January 10, 2005 12:23 PM
> To: nagios-users at lists.sourceforge.net
> Subject: [Nagios-users] comparison
> 
> I'm a system engineer at a firm that is looking at its current system
> management platform and is looking for alternatives. I was considering
> Nagios but what to compare it to the features that our current system
> provide. Could you tell me if Nagios can provide the following for us.
> 

It sounds like what you are describing is OpenView. Nagios is very
different, both architecturally and from a management and process
standpoint. While OpenView is very SNMP oriented, Nagios is more service
oriented (i.e. verify that your HTTP service is running and returning
valid data) so it's likely not to fit all your requirements without some
work or sometimes not at all. Below are some translations to associate
your goals with Nagios concepts. There may be other ways to implement
each request and these are only the ones that I thought of off the top
of my head.

> Network Monitoring/Alarm Features:
> - Ability to discover and store all IP addresses within the system
using
> fully qualified DNS names

Nagios doesn't auto-discover any hosts or services on it's own but you
may be able to use the third party program nmap2nagios to accomplish
this.

> - Ability to detect if any IP address is down to generate a management
> alarm.  Detect when a downed IP is restored to service.

Basic operation with an appropriate check defined (check_ping for
example).

> - Ability to use (MIBs) Management Information Base to capture key
> statistics

You can use check_snmp to query specific MIBs, compare to expected
output and alert appropriately. Check_snmp can not compare current
values against previous values so if you need that functionality you'd
need to use a different plugin or create your own (very easy). Nagios
can also be configured to accept SNMP alerts with the appropriate addon.
The documentation covers this last one.
 
> - Alarm generation based on MIB threshold statistics

See above.

> - Tools to manage MIBs (MIB browser) and make config changes.

There are no addons that support this functionality that I am aware of.
A fairly complete list of available configuration front-ends is
available at http://www.nagiosexchange.org/Configuration.40.0.html. Some
are better than others, YMMV. I think the vast majority of users manage
the configs by hand or have created their own management tools based on
their specific needs and information stores.
 

> - Graphical interface to organize alarms status indicators

Basic functionality presumably. You can peruse the screenshots online to
see if it fits your needs.

> - Alarm correlation to manage event floods

Proper configuration of parents and host/service dependencies will
likely fit the bill.

> Sever Monitoring/Management Features
> - Monitor any number of logfiles on a server for error codes/patter
> matching

Depends on the OS. Check_log for unix-like boxes and there is
information in the archives on how to check Windows logs.

> - Detection of utilization threshold events for file systems, memory
and
> CPU

How it's done depends on the OS. There are plugins for most I believe.
These types of checks usually require nrpe or nsclient to check remote
hosts unless SNMP is used.

> - Monitor a configurable list of software apps for running status

Yes, can check the process list using one of the tools mentioned above.

> - Tools to allow system admin to efficiently change any of the
monitoring
> config files on a large number of servers

This depends on your system design but I've found that rsync works
beautifully for me. Distributed monitoring might be what you are looking
for but it's unknown how many monitoring machines you're going to have
or how many hosts/services you're going to monitor.

> - Generate alarms for any condition threshold that is exceeded. Alarms
are
> sent to a single user display.

I'd call this one basic functionality. It's a vague requirement but
generally if you can translate the alarm check and conditional
requirements to a unix command-line program then you can alert on it
with Nagios.

> - Automatically invoke scripts when selected condition threshold
> conditions are met

Eventhandlers

> - Server monitoring by intelligent agents, only alarms are sent to
central
> server (bandwidth, alarm persistence and reliability benefit)

Passive checks although Nagios doesn't really supply the 'intelligent
agents'. You can use cron + plugin/NSCA wrapper to emulate the agents I
suppose or roll your own.

Hth,

marc 



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