Well that's a lot of questions. I would first suggest installing Opsview and just playing around it. They offer fully functional vm images although the setup is pretty simple regardless and they have good install guides. For me coming for the nagios world understanding the contacts and contact methods was the most difficult thing for me to get. In nagios contacts were in contactgroups and contactgroups were associated with hosts and services. With Opsview contacts are associated with hostgroups and services can have their own their own notification options or inherit from host.
I love the hostgroup hierarchy features of Opsview, for complex networks you can so nested logical grouping of items whereas with nagios you had a rather flat listing of hostgroups. Keep in mind Opsview Master server uses nagios NDO database so IO bottlenecks can become a problem a lot quicker with the MySQL dependancies than you would have seen with a generic nagios system. For my company we have started out with distributed monitoring using reverse ssh model since we are monitoring many sites across the internet. Migrate from nagios 2?? I helped one of my customers move from 2 nagios 2.x servers to Opsview. We tested all the custom plugins first, exported all the hosts and host dependancies from their nagios servers. Opsview can import some information from nagios 2.x but in our case we programmatically added hosts calling the Opsview API and made heavy use of host templates to build up the Opsview system. "It sounds like the only benefit of Master/Slave Servers are failover?" IMHO the master/slave setup gives you more scalability as you can spread the processing of checks over n+1 systems. Also if you are crossing geographic boundaries your polls are occurring close to the source they are polling, but you can control and view what is being monitored from a central source. "Both scenarios suggest a separate DB Server. Is this really necessary when running on VMware" You do not want contention of resources between the database and the application. Even in a master with multiple slave servers the master server has a constant stream of plugin data being returned to it. I currently have about 500 hosts and 1700 services and we are planning on moving the master server to a faster ESX server and splitting the database to it's own server. In our case we know we are going to be seeing a good bit of growth with monitoring so we have to be prepared. I also have a customer who has 1400 hosts and 2700 services housed on a ESX server and I expect the system to start smoking any day now because the hardware just isn't powerful enough. So virtualization can work but you need fast hardware and you may have to deal with time drift issues with 2.6 kernel and ESX. Overall it's worth it but just knowing nagios only gets you part of the way up to speed. Good luck! James Whittington VC3, Inc. From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Cook, Garry Sent: Tuesday, February 16, 2010 4:38 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [opsview-users] New User Seeks Advice I'm about to embark on an Opsview setup for a large company. I've been using Nagios since it was NetSaint, so I'm guessing I'll know my way around the inside of Opsview. However, I do have a few questions after looking over most of the documentation. First, some background. I haven't upgraded Nagios in quite a while, I'm still running v.2.11, monitoring about 600 hosts and 1700 services. Most of these are routers and switches with a few WAPs and servers thrown in. I expect that the total number of devices will grow to about 800 by year end. I also run MRTG on a separate server monitoring about 200 of these devices. This may grow to about 300, but I expect that Opsview will replace this installation as well. I have two Datacenters, one in Colorado and another in New York, although currently the monitoring servers live in the Colorado DC. The servers are all Ubuntu running on VMware ESX. Other apps in use include NeDi, SmokePing, Weathermap, and two proprietary Netflow apps. According to the Opsview docs, it seems that distributed monitoring is recommended for anything over 250 devices. There is also a recommended hardware spec for maximum scalability. So, questions that I have right now: 1. Should go with the Distributed Monitoring or Maximum Scalability model? 2. Should I attempt to migrate from Nagios 2, or would it be best to build from scratch? 3. It sounds like the only benefit of Master/Slave Servers are failover? So far I've read that you cannot run active/active. Have I just not yet found the documentation on load distribution? 4. Both scenarios suggest a separate DB Server. Is this really necessary when running on VMware, since I can just grow the server resources when necessary? Finally, please feel free to offer any other advice that you think might be helpful before I dive into this. All input is greatly appreciated. Thanks! Garry ________________________________ NOTICE: This e-mail and any files transmitted with it are the property of ARCADIS U.S., Inc. and its affiliates. All rights, including without limitation copyright, are reserved. 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