Choose Zabbix for free, easy system monitoring
Times are tough. Budgets are getting cut and everyone is being pushed to do more for less. As an I.T. Administrator, I needed a simple system to monitor my network and servers. When someone said the network is slow, I don’t have the luxury of spending half a day to troubleshoot it anymore.
Even if you do have all the resources in the world, a monitoring solution is really something you need to have on your network. Baselines and historical data are very hard to argue against when you are begging for money for network upgrades.
I set out on my journey to find an open source monitoring solution that was simple to setup and easy to use. I have a pretty standard network, but there are some special things I need to monitor. The product also has to be flexible enough to support custom monitoring.
Nagios: Great if you have hours and hours to invest in learning the system.
Nagios is an open-source icon. Most forums and network admins praise Nagios as being the best monitoring utility on the face of the planet. I am glad it is working for them. I needed something that was quick to setup and easy to use. Nagios was neither. Free software is great, but it is not really “free” if I spend hours upon hours trying to configure the damn thing. I did purchase the book hoping I would force myself to learn the in’s and out’s (since everyone else loves it, I tried to convince myself to love it). It’s just not worth it.
It is a very flexible and robust system, just too much effort for something that should really be more simple.
Osmius: Simple setup, but just not robust enough.
I downloaded this one from a recommendation of a friend. Setup was simple enough. Unfortunately the monitoring is very simple, too. This might be a nice tool for smaller networks, but certainly not one I would recommend for large, or even medium-size networks.
Pandora FMS: Great tool just not well supported.
I almost went with this tool. In fact, I had a difficult time recalling why I ditched it. It was a very simple setup. The agents make monitoring a breeze. The GUI is easy enough that I felt confident in creating accounts for others (outside of I.T.) to access the tool. The problem was when I hit the first snag. It’s open-source so I expected a decent user community. It just was not there. Between the forums and my mighty Google finger, I just was not able to solve the issue.
Hyperic HQ (the “FREE” version): Almost there, just still a little clunky.
Hyperic was one I tried long ago and seemed to remember liking. I fired up the new version and was pretty impressed. Again, easy setup and clean interface. Maybe this was the one for me? Then I tried their Windows agent… what rubbish. It did not capture the data I needed and it did not even work with my Windows 2000 Servers (which I did find the fix on their forums). I invested some time into it when I just decided it was time to move on.
Zabbix: I think we have a winner!
I’ll admit, the installation was a PITA. I did find an installation script that made the process a breeze on a fresh CentOS 5.2 system. Click here for the script; thanks Brendon Baumgartner!
Once the system was installed, I deployed my first agent. It was quick and easy. I needed something a tad more complex to test. I have APC SmartUPS devices in my IDF closets. Adding these were super-simple. Templates were built-in and I had them all monitored (and graphed) within minutes.
I am still in the process of learning the system. There are so many features that I am really excited about. For now, this has earned a gold star for network and server monitoring.
Update February 24th, 2009: I have posted a poll on this site for network monitoring. Please vote and/or post a comment about your favorite utility.
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