Jack Hughes over at The Tech Teapot posted today that Nagios has been forked. Apparently the lead developer (and sole person with commit access) has been very busy and not committing updates. This caused some self-described protagonists to launch "Icinga".
It's going to be very interesting to see where this goes. I personally hope that Nagios itself picks back up. My Nagios 3 installation is great, and I love it. I've had nothing but good things to say about it. If it doesn't pick back up, I have to wonder how many people will just move to OpenNMS.
Showing posts with label nagios. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nagios. Show all posts
Friday, May 8, 2009
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Future (or current?) replacement for Nagios?
I was unaware of this project, but thanks to stephenpc on twitter, I read an excellent (if a bit dated) article on RootDev which brought OpenNMS to my attention as a possible replacement for nagios.
I was mildly surprised, mostly because I haven't been shopping for a Nagios replacement since I installed and configured Nagios 3. I had looked at Zenoss as a possibility, but decided to stick with Nagios since I was already familiar with the configuration routine (and 3.x had some great improvements in that regard).
Judging by Craig's comments in that article, openNMS solves problems that I don't have, like so many hosts or services that you can't get to the bottom of the summary page without it refreshing. That's a problem I'm glad I don't have, but I know that some of you run very large networks. So my question would be, what do you large-network guys use for monitoring? And if you have a small network, do you use monitoring? I remember back to the time before I knew about monitoring solutions like Nagios, and it scares me to death. I would actually manually check on important services to make sure they were up, and that was my only way of doing it.
Of course, in my defense I was young and naive then, and didn't even backup things to tape. Ah, the folly of youth.
I was mildly surprised, mostly because I haven't been shopping for a Nagios replacement since I installed and configured Nagios 3. I had looked at Zenoss as a possibility, but decided to stick with Nagios since I was already familiar with the configuration routine (and 3.x had some great improvements in that regard).
Judging by Craig's comments in that article, openNMS solves problems that I don't have, like so many hosts or services that you can't get to the bottom of the summary page without it refreshing. That's a problem I'm glad I don't have, but I know that some of you run very large networks. So my question would be, what do you large-network guys use for monitoring? And if you have a small network, do you use monitoring? I remember back to the time before I knew about monitoring solutions like Nagios, and it scares me to death. I would actually manually check on important services to make sure they were up, and that was my only way of doing it.
Of course, in my defense I was young and naive then, and didn't even backup things to tape. Ah, the folly of youth.
Friday, April 10, 2009
Possible Nagios Conference in Baltimore
The LinkedIn Nagios Users Group posted a link to a survey to gauge interest in Nagios conference in Baltimore, MD timed to coincide with LISA, the misnamed Large Installation Systems Administration conference.
If you're considering going to LISA (and you should at least consider it) and you'd like to attend a Nagios Conference at the same time, take the survey.
I'd like to go, I just can't afford the price tag, and I know my work wouldn't cover it.
If you're considering going to LISA (and you should at least consider it) and you'd like to attend a Nagios Conference at the same time, take the survey.
I'd like to go, I just can't afford the price tag, and I know my work wouldn't cover it.
Monday, June 23, 2008
Mobile Notifications
I briefly touched on having a monitoring system for your network, but that's only half the battle. The other half is getting the alert and taking action on it.
The way my system is configured, I have Nagios monitoring a couple of hundred resources around the network, from pings to diskspace to server room temperature. In the event that something goes wrong, an alert is generated, and an email is sent out. On the mail server, I have a rule specified to forward that email to my blackberry's email address (since we don't have a Blackberry
Enterprise server). My phone then rings to let me know I've got mail. Depending on the severity, members of the operations or management team are notified as well, and my gmail is also set to get alerts. The overall idea is that I become notified regardless of where I am. I've even toyed with the idea of an AIM bot that connects and sends me messages if I'm online.
It's definitely a trade-off. Having this alert system makes me feel a lot more confident in knowing that the network is up and running, but at the expense of my personal life. It's unfortunate, but since I'm really the only administrator, I bear the responsibility of making sure it's working. That's what they pay me for, and I don't get paid by the hour. It's much nicer if you have another person available with whom you share on-call duties. Until you get to that point, you have even more vested interest in making the network reliable and fault-tolerant.
The way my system is configured, I have Nagios monitoring a couple of hundred resources around the network, from pings to diskspace to server room temperature. In the event that something goes wrong, an alert is generated, and an email is sent out. On the mail server, I have a rule specified to forward that email to my blackberry's email address (since we don't have a Blackberry
Enterprise server). My phone then rings to let me know I've got mail. Depending on the severity, members of the operations or management team are notified as well, and my gmail is also set to get alerts. The overall idea is that I become notified regardless of where I am. I've even toyed with the idea of an AIM bot that connects and sends me messages if I'm online.
It's definitely a trade-off. Having this alert system makes me feel a lot more confident in knowing that the network is up and running, but at the expense of my personal life. It's unfortunate, but since I'm really the only administrator, I bear the responsibility of making sure it's working. That's what they pay me for, and I don't get paid by the hour. It's much nicer if you have another person available with whom you share on-call duties. Until you get to that point, you have even more vested interest in making the network reliable and fault-tolerant.
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