Nagios as a replacement for HP OpenView

[Mohr James]

Hi All!

I have been given the task of looking into OpenSource software as either
a supplement to or replacement for HP OpenView. I have found a number of
places that say things like "Nagios is not initially designed to be a
Full Blown SNMP Monitoring and Control system like HP OpenView".
However, I cannot go to my boss with a vague statement like that. So, I
am initially looking for something that compares the two
feature-by-feature, more or less. I did a search on google, but did not
find anything very useful. Does anyone know of a feature comparision?

One of the key aspects is that we have a number of applications that we
need to monitor. For example, Apache, BEA WebLogic, and a number of our
own applications. Among other things, monitoring consists of making sure
the processes are running, parsing log files, etc. Based on the doc that
I have read it seems that I would need to define a service for each
application and then create our own plug-in that monitors the
app/service and sets the status accordingly. Is this right, so far? 

One thing I am missing is that it appears as if services are "state"
oriented and not "event" oriented. That is, you have the states good,
warning, or bad but know nothing about the cause of any problems.  For
example, our application could be "bad" because 5 different conditions.
Would each of these 5 conditions be what appears in "Status
Information"? Can I provide or send "messages" in the sense of OpenView
that are event based? That is simply "Hey folks, XXX has just happened"?


As I mentioned we need to monitor if certain processes are running and I
came across the "Process Monitor Plugin". It talks about optionally
restarting the process. Is the ability to start programs something built
into Nagios or just this one plug-in. We have some many cases were
automated actions are started when certain events occur. In many cases
these are sent 

What about remotely starting actions from the console?  For example, a
message comes that a certain condition exists, and we start an action
that performs an additional check on the system. Or, a service stops and
we do not want it to be automatically started. Instead we want to be
able to start it on demand. 

I have also been looking for something that describe Nagios in abstract
terms, rather than telling me how to configure it. Something along the
lines of a schematic diagram of the various components, who communicates
with whom, how they communicat, what processes are running where and so
on. 

Any info is greatly appreaciated.

Regards,

Jim Mohr


-------------------------------------------------------
This SF.Net email is sponsored by: IBM Linux Tutorials
Free Linux tutorial presented by Daniel Robbins, President and CEO of
GenToo technologies. Learn everything from fundamentals to system
administration.http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id70&alloc_id638&op=click
_______________________________________________
Nagios-users mailing list
Nagios-users at lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nagios-users
::: Please include Nagios version, plugin version (-v) and OS when reporting any issue. 
::: Messages without supporting info will risk being sent to /dev/null