Rev. Jeffrey Paul (sneak) writes:
>
> 1) Is SNMP the best way to do this? Obviously some of the data (service
> checks) will need to be collected other ways.
SNMP, the vendor MIBs + SNMP extensions for monitoring hardware
specifics
(PSU, etc...), and something like Nagios to do the TCP/network checks.
> 2) Is there any good solution that does both logging/trending of this
> data and also notification/monitoring/alerting? I've used both Nagios
> and Cacti in the past, and, due to the number of individual things being
> monitored (3-5 items per OS instance, 5-10 items per physical server,
> 10-50 things per network device), setting them both up independently
> seems like a huge pain. Also, I've never really liked Nagios that much.
Well, you could look at Zabbix, Hyperic, ZenOSS, OpenNMS and see if
they cut it better for you, but the trick with Nagios is to use
a DB and generate the include files automatically, then have some
other more user friendly tools to populate the DB. Or use templates
extensively.
Then make sure your plugins output performance data for perf.data
monitoring, and use something like NagiosGraph
http://nagiosgraph.wiki.sourceforge.net/ or PNP4Nagios:
http://www.pnp4nagios.org/pnp/about#system_requirements
http://nagiosplug.sourceforge.net/developer-guidelines.html#AEN203
http://www.pnp4nagios.org/pnp/screenshots
> I recently entertained the idea of writing a CGI that output all of this
> information in a standard format (csv?), distributing and installing it, then
> collecting it periodically at a central location and doing all the
> rrd/notification myself, but then realized that this problem must've
> been solved a million times already.
Yes :) But check out the above links, and with a bit of planning
and a small amount of coding/adapting existing components, it will
work out.
> There's got to be a better way. What do you guys use?
We rewrote our own NMS from scratch :)
> (I'm not opposed to non-free solutions, provided they work better.)
We sell our solution, so I'm biased, but do check out the Nagios
route, it works well enough for small to medium, and larger
installations
with careful planning (problem with Nagios is how to make it perform
with thousands of hosts).
Hth,
Phil
