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This site is monitored with Zenoss Core.
System monitoring tools have been around since the beginning of systems. A quick Google search for “system monitoring software” returns over 21 million results. It’s literally from “A” to “Z”. Accel Ops to Zenoss with a ton of systems in between. Each has its own hook, some with reporting for the bosses and some application specific. All can measure uptime. Picking one is like choosing ice cream, what flavor do you like?
Over the past few years, I have worked with Nagios, Zabbix, Solarwinds Orion, Tivoli and Zenoss. All are more than adequate for most environments. Nagios is cheap but it will take some time to install. I’m going to mention Tivoli but it’s not affordable unless you work in a heavy IBM shop. Orion is by far the slickest system but it’s also expensive, approximately $10,000, including equipment, to start. If you have a spare stack of cash laying around and need an “Out of the Box” install, this is the monitoring package for you.
With a slow economy, not many want to spend their precious dollars on an expensive monitoring tool. How would you spend $10,000 if it was available? I don’t think a monitoring system would be at the top of the list. Monitoring is a must in any enterprise but it’s hard to qualify the spend.
A few years ago I gave Zenoss a second look. The core (free) package had come a long way and due to their efforts the user community began to grow and provide a decent amount of feedback as well as community based add-ons. I decided to give it a try and had a core system up and running in about an hour monitoring about 10 network devices and 20 or so servers. It worked great and we decided to run it in parallel with our Nagios install.
Last November we gave Nagios the boot and migrated all our monitoring to Zenoss. Today, we use Zenoss to monitor our California and Chicago area data centers. We couldn’t be happier.
Put your old hardware to work and give Zenoss a try.
