re Nagios as a replacement for HP OpenView

[Greg King]

<snip>
> Nagios' server
> checks are more basic than HPOVs but basic process
> and log file scrubbing plugins are available.

Can you be a little more specific? What's is missing?

##The hpov agent is a complete subsystem with a messaging system, correlation engine, snmp trap handler, software and data xfer mechanisms, and template interpreter. It includes precompiled programs and scripts to perform support actions and commands. Compared to this, Nagios provides an good set of utilities (plugins) kind of like the commands part of hpov, but it is your responsibility to get the commands to the target system, setup the communication via NRPE and/or NSCA, and trigger the checks from the central console or setup the passive monitoring.  

<snip>
> action parts. If you need the deep application
> monitoring of an OVO SPI, Nagios is not there yet.

Well, as long as I can start anything based on an event, then I say we
are good to go. One "issue" is the annotation in the messages. When
certain events occur we run auto actions that add output as an
annotation. Is there any way that we can do that? Is there any way of
passing "fairly" large chunks of data to the server (e.g. > 2K)?

##I have not seen anything like that in Nagios, but I'm still learning.


What about remote action not related to events? For example, we have
dozens of applications that start processes on the remote machines. Is
there anything built in?

## I have not seen anything like a time template for remote actions, or any actions in general. Nagios' focus is on monitoring or "check_*" services. 

<snip>
each performance
> metric must be setup manually in Nagios/apan, and
> the Unix support doesn't seem to be as flexible as
> the Windows support with apan.

What do you mean by "manually"? I imagine that you have do define them
individually in the config files. Is that correct?

##Yes. In Nagios, there is no common set of performance metrics that are logged for all managed hosts, and can be tested for threshold violations or logged for historical analysis. If you want to monitor and/or log CPU, or network traffic, you must setup the config files to do so for each metric and possibly differently for each server depending on what is available (snmp, win perfmon #, Unix stats, etc.).  

Which brings up another point: templates. Other than ftp, scp, etc is
there anything built in to nagios for the distribution of "templates"?

##No. In fact you probably will have to compile the plugins, NCSA, and NRPE on the target system, so you will need a C compiler there and maybe a few other development type things. I'm still working through all that. With Nagios there is no remote "agent" in the HPOV sense. The NRPE NCSA deamons enable communication between the target and the Nagios server, but Nagios triggers the checks or you set them up passively in cron on the target.

Regards, Greg



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