Monitoring

[Jeffrey Ollie]

On Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 11:49 AM, Mike McGrath <mmcgrath at redhat.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 4 Mar 2010, Jeffrey Ollie wrote:
>
>> FWIW I stopped using Zabbix at $DAYJOB a while ago.  I've been giving
>> OpenNMS a try out and mostly I'm happy so far.  The primary blocker
>> for use in Fedora Infrastructure is getting it packaged properly.
>
> Now this is an interesting tidbit.  Can you give a brief review of the two
> and why you're on OpenNMS now?

I got frustrated with Zabbix because as things grew, it became very
cumbersome to add services to be monitored, especially in an
environment like mine where I need to monitor a lot of Cisco gear, but
I don't necessarily want to graph the state of every port.

I decided to try OpenNMS because of the "enterprise" level monitoring
systems they are the most committed to Open Source (IMHO, "Open Core"
doesn't count and I try and avoid it whenever possible).

I like it because it does a very good job of discovering your network.
 I have things set up so that as soon as a new switch sends a SNMP
trap OpenNMS will discover the switch and start monitoring it.  The
discovery process and what gets monitored is highly customizable as
well.

One other thing that I like is that it uses PostgreSQL as it's
database, which probably not everyone would :).

One downside of OpenNMS is that it's configured through a large number
of XML files.  It can be hard to grok what goes where at first and the
documentation is sketchy at best.  It's also annoying when you install
a new version and you have to go through a few .rpmnew files to see
what changed (although I bring a lot of that pain on myself since I'm
running nightly snapshots of the development version).

One other downside is that for large environments you have to do a lot
of tuning of PostgreSQL and be prepared to commit a lot of memory.  I
have my setup running pretty well right now but I had to throw a lot
of resources at it.  But maybe that's just because I don't have a lot
of experience optimizing PostgreSQL databases.

Professional support is available for OpenNMS... maybe if Fedora is
serious about using it they might comp us some support?

I'm really still in the testing phases with it, as I don't have a lot
of time to really dig into the details.  I'm not sure how long I'll be
running it though as non-technical issues might prevail (the rest of
the department isn't as committed to Open Source as I am and want
something shrink-wrapped and GUI-riffic).

-- 
Jeff Ollie