Associate
I know this thread is a few months old, but thought I'd chime in.
Nagios is free and has probably the best support for monitoring devices, however it's clunky and not very scalable amongst other things. And yes it needs a lot of out of the box configuration and plugins, etc.
That's why I recommend OMD - Open Monitoring Distribution (http://omdistro.org/). It's free too but it's amazing!
A bunch of ex-Nagios developers/guys got together and thought "How can we make the best monitoring platform with all the plugins you ever need, is scalable and is simple to set up and works right out of the box" and that is pretty much what it is!
After I start playing with it, I wholeheartedly would never spend a penny on another monitoring platform that I eventually will be stuck with and fed up of. OMD is a lot better than Opsview and other similar solutions, Nagios is only a small part of it. It's called a distribution because everything you need is integrated.
I can't recommend it enough, it really is that good.
Within minutes I had network devices configured via SNMP, VCenter, vSphere hosts, VM's and all their services discovered automatically using the Check_MK agent, I didn't need the crappy Perl SDK for VMWare monitoring (it uses the native HTTP API and is quite fast) and then displayed on a wallboard via Nagvis. It monitors Windows Servers as well as Linux Servers and automatically does an inventory to discover what's running on it and starts monitoring.
It comes with all this configured to work together right out of the box:
Nagios
Monitoring Plugins (Former known as Nagios-Plugins)
nsca
check_nrpe
Icinga
Shinken
NagVis
pnp4nagios
rrdtool/rrdcached
Check_MK
MK Livestatus
Multisite
Dokuwiki
Thruk
Mod-Gearman
check_logfiles
check_oracle_health
check_mysql_health
jmx4perl
check_webinject
check_multi
If you have sysadmins who prefer a specific UI, they don't have to be stuck with a specific one, all they have to do is open a web browser, point to the URL of your OMD site which is set up when you create a site (look at the linked docs below!) and you can just click another UI that is listed above.
The best thing is that if you configure hosts on one UI, they appear on all of them, it's very seamless. The plugin does away with the Nagios agent which if you have worked with it is heavy and sends way too much data between the hosts you are monitoring and the monitoring server. The check_mk agent is used instead which is lightweight.
You need to have a bit of experience with linux (Installing the software and basic linux command know how)
There's plenty of guides out there to get going with it and you can use the command line instead of the UI to set up your hosts too.
https://www.digitalocean.com/commun...ng-distribution-with-check_mk-on-ubuntu-14-04
This is semi-official by one of the people involved with OMD, it's for the check_mk component which is the one I prefer to set all the monitoring up with:
https://mathias-kettner.de/checkmk_install_with_omd.html
https://mathias-kettner.com/checkmk.html
The above site has in depth documentation and is the one I'm following. It has guides on setting up esxi hosts as well as Windows Server 2012 R2 and some physical hardware such as IBM v7000's, Netapp SANs, etc.
This one allows you to configure via command line:
https://cunninghamshane.com/simple-nagios-setup-with-open-monitoring-distribution/
https://cunninghamshane.com/check_mk-agent-setup-and-configuration/
Nagios is free and has probably the best support for monitoring devices, however it's clunky and not very scalable amongst other things. And yes it needs a lot of out of the box configuration and plugins, etc.
That's why I recommend OMD - Open Monitoring Distribution (http://omdistro.org/). It's free too but it's amazing!
A bunch of ex-Nagios developers/guys got together and thought "How can we make the best monitoring platform with all the plugins you ever need, is scalable and is simple to set up and works right out of the box" and that is pretty much what it is!
After I start playing with it, I wholeheartedly would never spend a penny on another monitoring platform that I eventually will be stuck with and fed up of. OMD is a lot better than Opsview and other similar solutions, Nagios is only a small part of it. It's called a distribution because everything you need is integrated.
I can't recommend it enough, it really is that good.
Within minutes I had network devices configured via SNMP, VCenter, vSphere hosts, VM's and all their services discovered automatically using the Check_MK agent, I didn't need the crappy Perl SDK for VMWare monitoring (it uses the native HTTP API and is quite fast) and then displayed on a wallboard via Nagvis. It monitors Windows Servers as well as Linux Servers and automatically does an inventory to discover what's running on it and starts monitoring.
It comes with all this configured to work together right out of the box:
Nagios
Monitoring Plugins (Former known as Nagios-Plugins)
nsca
check_nrpe
Icinga
Shinken
NagVis
pnp4nagios
rrdtool/rrdcached
Check_MK
MK Livestatus
Multisite
Dokuwiki
Thruk
Mod-Gearman
check_logfiles
check_oracle_health
check_mysql_health
jmx4perl
check_webinject
check_multi
If you have sysadmins who prefer a specific UI, they don't have to be stuck with a specific one, all they have to do is open a web browser, point to the URL of your OMD site which is set up when you create a site (look at the linked docs below!) and you can just click another UI that is listed above.
The best thing is that if you configure hosts on one UI, they appear on all of them, it's very seamless. The plugin does away with the Nagios agent which if you have worked with it is heavy and sends way too much data between the hosts you are monitoring and the monitoring server. The check_mk agent is used instead which is lightweight.
You need to have a bit of experience with linux (Installing the software and basic linux command know how)
There's plenty of guides out there to get going with it and you can use the command line instead of the UI to set up your hosts too.
https://www.digitalocean.com/commun...ng-distribution-with-check_mk-on-ubuntu-14-04
This is semi-official by one of the people involved with OMD, it's for the check_mk component which is the one I prefer to set all the monitoring up with:
https://mathias-kettner.de/checkmk_install_with_omd.html
https://mathias-kettner.com/checkmk.html
The above site has in depth documentation and is the one I'm following. It has guides on setting up esxi hosts as well as Windows Server 2012 R2 and some physical hardware such as IBM v7000's, Netapp SANs, etc.
This one allows you to configure via command line:
https://cunninghamshane.com/simple-nagios-setup-with-open-monitoring-distribution/
https://cunninghamshane.com/check_mk-agent-setup-and-configuration/
Last edited: