[nzlug] Nagios vs. OpenNMS

[Mark Foster]

On Fri, 24 Nov 2006, Jonathon Sim wrote:

> Vik Olliver wrote:
>> A colleague is trying to decide whether to use Nagios (Netsaint, as was)
>> and OpenNMS. Without going into the nitty-gritty of exactly what he's
>> doing with it - let's just assume both are adequate for the moment - are
>> there any major reasons as to why one would prefer one over t'other?
>> 
>> 
> From my experience, having used Nagios for years to monitor all sorts of 
> stuff and hating it enough to investigate most of the alternatives:
> * Nagios is written in C so is fast and easy to install. It also works well 
> enough and has been around for ages, and is what we currently use in 
> production. However it has flaws (the one that really bothers me is its habit 
> of dying and leaving behind lock files that stop it restarting, meaning your 
> monitoring goes offline - then who monitors the monitoring daemon? (cfengine 
> in our case is the answer))
> * OpenNMS is Java-based so is slow and hard to install by comparison (a lot 
> harder than "apt-get install nagios" anyway).  However it looks cool - but in 
> the end, its slowness and hard-to-installness, or more importantly, 
> hard-to-guarantee-will-keep-runningness is a killer for us).  If you already 
> run java stuff on your servers though it looks like the most actively 
> developed and "coolest".

Thoughts on simple alternatives appreciated, by the way. I have had this 
arguement with myself numerous times, Nagios was actually pretty hard to 
set up as a newbie.

My interest is mainly in network devices, so I'd even consider simple 'up 
or down' monitoring with a halfway decent gui.

Mark.