What performance management tool are you using?

Narj

Narj

Narj

Soldato
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...and what are your experiences/opinions? Just a few bullet points would be nice.

Bby performance management I mean SNMP statistics pollers/graphers, not Network Management tools like NNM/Entuity/Whatsup etc :)

I'm really interested in finding out what other people are using to report on their network and IT infrastructure and what their thoughts are. I've used Cacti, IV and Sevone previously....

Cacti
+ Free
+ Simple to use
+ Pleasant interface
+ Large user community
+ Lots of free, useful addons (eg: Weathermap)
- Not really designed for high frequency troublehooting polling
- Can't really create nice dashboards easily
- Custom polling requires some work/perl knowledge

IV
+ Good poller, can do high res no problem
+ Can develop your own stuff easily
+ Highly scalable
+ Nice front end and attractive output
+ Can easily create clever dashboards with aggregated data
- Ridiculously expensive
- Per node licencing
- Admin overhead needs someone that knows what they're doing

SevOne
+ Fast, responsive interface
+ Clever features like time over time for trend comparisons
+ Appliance based, so support is straightforward
+ Responsive dev team
- Fugly interface
- Not as flexible/easy for developing your own metrics
- Annoying licencing model
- Needs thought on exclusions due to the above
 
Been using OpenNMS in terms of what i liked

+ Doesn't require extensive configuration out of the box - tell it to scan your network and it picks up most things and auto monitors available SNMP and other services
+ Quick to get up and running (suppose thats a re-iteration of the above)
+ Gave us lots of graphs
+ After eventually working out how to add additional graphs/SNMP OIDs to monitor for custom hardware it was quite good
+ Supports path outages - so if a router goes down it doesn't then tell you it can't reach all the servers beyond it
+ Free
- It allowed the DB to grow too large and killed the vm i was running it on (i abandoned it at this point as i don't really have the time - an NMS is only a niceity not a requirement for us)
- It was tricky to add custom OIDs for SNMP - had to delve deep into configuration files and whatnot.
- Doesn't out of the box tell you the connected MACs for each switch port via SNMP like the ManageEngine one did (but that isn't free)

I did like the ManageEngine product but can't really justify spending anything on something like this, plus it didn't seem that flexible.

I was also using Splunk for Syslog logging/web access which oddly enough i was looking at it again today, hoping to find an alternative which was properly free - not a con like Splunk seems to be! (That also used too much DB storage and killed a VM - different one to the OpenNMS one)

Other systems i've used and didn't like - Nagios, PandoraFMS both seemed difficult to setup or required lots of manual configuration. I also don't like agents on the hosts - all the info is there via SNMP there's no real need for an agent.
 
dave-lew99 said:
Splunk for Syslog logging/web access which oddly enough i was looking at it again today, hoping to find an alternative which was properly free - not a con like Splunk seems to be! (That also used too much DB storage and killed a VM - different one to the OpenNMS one)

Other systems i've used and didn't like - Nagios, PandoraFMS both seemed difficult to setup or required lots of manual configuration. I also don't like agents on the hosts - all the info is there via SNMP there's no real need for an agent.
Click to expand...

I'm trying out Splunk at the moment actually... You can do some clever stuff with it, and it's nice being able to trigger your own scripts if you pay for the upmarket version. Whenever you get a trigger, the resulting output is stored in a .gz file (passed to your script as $8) so it's easy to parse the info into an SNMP trap, for example. There's splunkbase.com as well which has a load of free stuff written by others.

Still not sure if it's worth the monies for what it does, though...
 
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I've dabbled with Nagios & Cacti, but it took a lot of time to setup initially and it's still not finished. Like you it's categorised as "nice to have, someday maybe"

Funnily enough I had a guy on the phone this morning trying to sell me Splunk, there's a education webinar on the 5th of April.
 
Cacti for basic monitoring.

Applications Manager by Manage Engine - promises the world but isn't reliable.

Solarwinds (pretty much entire lot APM/NPM/Profile/Kiwi) Very good, but has the price tag.

PRTG - Bloody brilliant and extremely cheap!
 
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