Re: [gentoo-user] open source monitoring on gentoo

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

On Monday 27 June 2011 17:33:45 Mick did opine thusly:
> On Monday 27 Jun 2011 08:45:06 Stefan G. Weichinger wrote:
> > thanks to all for your suggestion.
> > Still not sure where to turn ...
> > 
> > Stefan
> 
> We can't know which one may best match your
> needs/expectations/preferences. You can spend some time looking at
> their documentation to get an understanding of how difficult it may
> be to configure them and then play with their online demos to
> experience the touch & feel of each.
> 
> Then install the one that best matches your requirements and if your
> don't like it enough install the second best and so on.  If you are
> prepared to get your hands dirty you can somewhat customise the
> look and feel (e.g. using CSS), but the monitoring engine is what
> will provide you with the necessary functionality.
> 
> Personally, I ended up using Nagios because at the time it had a
> load of plugins that others did not.  Once I spent a lot of time
> installing graphing engines and configuring it, I had invested too
> much time to ditch it and try something different.
> 
> Thankfully, you can start afresh your quest and evaluate how each of
> these tools meets your requirements.

We're going through the same research nightmare. Our conclusions:

1. Nothing out there just does everything a large network would really 
want.
2. Some projects have very stable code but not much plugins, others 
have lots of plugins but the dev model leads to unstable code
3. Monitoring is NOT off the shelf, it is highly bespoke
4. Regardless of what you choose you will go through X effort to get 
it going and Y effort to get it to do what you want. The value is Y is 
amazingly similar regardless of the project (given that the starting 
code is at least somewhat mature).

iow, your comments are right on the money, that is indeed how to do 
it.


-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com