What performance management tool are you using?

[Narj]

...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

 

[Narj]

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.

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...