Some noise about Nagios ..

[Stanley Hopcroft]

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,

I am writing with some comments about Nagios and it's intended function.

Most of this is only marginally related to using Nagios.

My employer has asked my input on a paper evaluation of the famous brand
'Enterprise Management Softwares' (EMS). Since this is a family program
I won't bother naming them.

This evaluation was the result of managements perception of
shortcomings in the management of systems and that best of breed
soltions (such as monitoring Web logic internals or the guts of
Oracle) were incomplete. My participation was at least partly the result
of needing to enlist a Nagios partisan, since Nagios has been in use
here for some (very happy, alas) years.

Those responsible suggested the following shortcomings in 'best of
breed' products (element managers, availability monitors are other
names)


1. the usual management hard asks of asset/inventory/code
   distribution (ie desktops)/service desk integration/change
   management integration,
  
but more interestingly

2. business view

  - multiple views, including relationships (producer-consumer and so
    on) of 'business processes', including the IT objects that actually
    do the work

  - reporting against systems (business processes) rather (or as well
    as) against elements

  - alarms from business processes for events of business significance

    . notification that some process had exceeded its outage limit for
      example

    . at least one of the products had Prolog based rule systems for
      determining how to react (who, how etc). Very nice.

  - cause analysis ('root cause analysis') in helping pinpoint
    the IT cause of a business system failure - this is 
    hard to do with undocumented or otherwise opaque  supply chains.

    . this may simply be a consequence of having a multi-level 
      diagram of the entities involved in business processes (whether
      you lay this out or the system does [for bonus marks] seems
      irrelevant) that is responsive to the health of the IT elements.

    . on the other hand, it may be the result of inference from rules
      (the knee bones connected to the toe bone ..)

3. user view of transactions - including measurement of user
   transactions

   . most of the EMS would only do synthetic transactions, even though
     they provided record and replay tools to do so (Syn Trxs are
     useless for update transactions). 

4. being able to provide multiple perspectives of costly IT resources
   such as storage, being able to analyse in real time, how much and
   where, at the various views

Obviously, such things may not be useful to all classes of Nagios
users. Those whose main game is box management, and who are skillful
enough to master it, will wonder why bother. On the other hand,
facilities such as those above make Nag attractive to a wider audience.

The business view is the one that really intrigues me. The prospect of a
Nag drag and drop GUI that can associate managed IT elements with
systems sounds wonderful.

However, inference based reactions also sounds very chic.

Nagios by comparison with the EMSs demonstrates a great deal of
flexibility.

Adding or thinking about such things would be very helpful.

Yours sincerely.

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Stanley Hopcroft
------------------------------------------------------------------------

'...No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the
continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a
manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes
me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know
for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee...'

from Meditation 17, J Donne.


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