External Monitoring and Alerting (follow-up)

[Alan Johnson]

On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 10:19 PM, Kenny Lussier <klussier at gmail.com> wrote:

> ... very feature-rich monitoring system. It
> seems to follow in the footsteps of so many other powerful, flexible,
> highly configurable open source applications.


If that's the kind of thing you are looking for, then you might consider
OpenNMS.  They offer repos so it was very easy to get up and running.  From
what I understand, it can do just about anything, it is just a question of
how well what's already available fits into your problem versus
writing/customizing your own plugins (there are many supported languages).
It competes with the likes of HP Openview, and What's Up Gold, or
Solarwinds, so it might be over kill for your appliction.

Now, getting it running and making it do what you want are 2 very different
things.  I have not had as much time as I'd like, but for our internal use,
it gently discovered everything in the IPA range I gave it, and started ping
monitoring.  It gathers very nice statistics from that.  After tweaking some
SNMP settings, I have it getting some kind of data off all the ports of a
near-by switch, but I haven't gotten far enough to get the graphs I want yet
(throughput per port).  I've done all that with just the web interface, but
I haven't made anything interesting happen with the config files, which is
where I have to focus to get what I want out of it.


> The documentation it
> severely lacking, and the forums are full of "me too" :-)
>
>
OpenNMS appears to have extensive documentation to the point where it is a
lot to wade through.  So far, I have tried to skim thorugh it, but I'm not
familiar enough with the under lying concepts (SNMP etc.) to get where I
want with skimming.  I just have to slow down and do some periferal reading
as well, which I will probably never have time for. =)

They also appear to have a very active and helpful community.  I have not
participated yet, because I don't want to bother anyone unless I am able to
focus on the issues, which I don't have the cycles for right now.  I'm sure
that if we HAD a decent monitoring system, I'd have more cycles for projects
like this! =)  Instead, I just respond to problems when they've gotten bad
enough for a user to notice.  blah.

Finally, there is a commercial support offering.  So if you can talk the
bosses into spending money, you could pay them to set it up and show you the
ropes.
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