SNMP Monitors

Coarch · #1 28th November 2007, 11:06 PM

I've recently install and used Cacti, Nagios, ZenOSS, and Zabbix. I've setting up each to monitor my network using SNMP. This has gone on now for about 4 months.

Nagios was a bear to setup while ZenOSS and Zabbix took about the same amount of time. Zabbix kept on corrupting itself after about 2 weeks. ZenOSS wasn't easily customizable and the best features you have to pay for. Nagios took to much time for me take get the most out of its package. Some packages had better incident and case management utilities then others. Cacti was the best long term solution for me. It was easiest to setup and customize. In the long term I found its interface easiest to use to browse over my networks stats.

I'm curious to get other peoples opinions and experiences.

HaydnH · #2 29th November 2007, 02:57 PM

I haven't used cacti, but I really like Nagios. Agreed it does take a little while to learn the configuration files but once it's setup it's easy to use and add/remove hosts to the monitoring etc, I've used Nagios in an environment with Linux, Solaris (Sparc) and Windows and it worked like a charm.

ibbo · #3 29th November 2007, 04:43 PM

I tend to use just snmpget etc from the shell but have used scotty/ tkined in the past (which is a dead rat now I think). It was excellent for traps and notifications.

OPNET 7 or 8 years back for solaris was pretty cool but it too had a large learning curve.

If you have any programming skills you can knock up your own snmp aware apps. PERL has a module and you can also use c, c++ amongst others.

Ibbo

HaydnH · #4 29th November 2007, 04:57 PM

I meant to post a link to nagios plugins where scripts are available to monitor just about anything you'd ever want to monitor - and then some... but I forgot:

http://www.nagiosexchange.org/

Haydn.

Coarch · #5 29th November 2007, 06:05 PM

My impression of Nagios is that is was a great tool, but it was a 'what you get is equal to the time you put into it'. Cacti on the other hand is quick to setup and is intuitive to use but doesn't come with as many features. ZenOSS looks to be a happy merge of the two but I haven't use the enterprise version yet. The free version doesn't look to be a completely rounded solution.

HaydnH · #6 30th November 2007, 10:31 AM

I was just thinking it would be easy enough to create scripts for Nagios to avoid having to play with config files, then I thought somebody must have already done something like this. Google shows a project on sourceforge called Fruity which apparently is a web front end for configuring Nagios... it's only in Beta/RC2 but could be worth a look.

http://fruity.sourceforge.net/

Haydn.