Server paging utility

[Jordan, Jason A]

It's all about flavor at this point.  Nagios does have some sophisticated elements and I'm sure 
that there are many
promising plugins and active support from the community.

BB doesn't have an initial fee - for server or client.  After they merged with Quest they started 
pushing their higher
edition - I've looked at the evaluation edition of the advanced and see no benefit from it.
BB is also unlimited - right now I have a single box processing syslog-ng traffic, one BB server 
running scripts and
feeding data to a BB "display" server which runs of course BB and apache, etc.  The display server 
started generating
phantom CPU problems once we hit 300 or so total monitored elements, but performance has been 
unaffected.  At this point
we're using it to monitor all production devices (on some level).  I don't have it do much on our 
Microsoft boxes,
however it does have a feeler out for all of our Solaris, Cisco, VSAT, and Linux.  

Bottom line - there is some good stuff out there to match any budget.  I've trained my management 
using Pavlovian
green/red controls.  To each their own - it's an uphill battle.  As long as we the BOFH can have a 
clear concept of
system status and can justify our existence - it's a good world.

-----Original Message-----
From: Brian Kelsay [mailto:bkelsay at comcast.net] 
Sent: Monday, April 26, 2004 5:33 PM
Cc: kclug at kclug.org
Subject: Re: Server paging utility

Jordan, Jason A wrote:

> Yes, I have nagios running as part of the Sentinix distro.  In my testing with various IT 
management, the
multi-layered
> approach of BB from simplistic (green=good, red=bad) to detailed log messages works better.
> 
> Plus, its impressive to show every server's status in one view (even your Windows boxes) with 
highly customizable
> monitoring for each server.
> 
> I've added elements of MRTG in as well to cover our routers and some custom scripting is parsing 
syslog-ng messages as
> well.
> 

Nagios has screens for displaying info on multiple servers in many 
different ways.  It looks to me to be very flexible.  To each his own. 
May also depend on the number of servers being monitored.  With 200 
servers, your boss probably didn't mind spending the $$ and Big Brother 
does have a free version.  I like the model of Nagios better though. 
let you use it on how ever many you want, open API so users can create 
new modules and clients and then you have a model for paid support.  BB 
looks like it relies on paid support contracts also, but has an initial 
lug you must pay to run on more than a certain number of servers.  I 
could be wrong, please correct me on this.

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