SNMP agents versus Nagios agents

[Thornton Prime]

> It seems that you do agree that the SNMP table for a device can reindex
> with a reboot or change to certain system configuration (hard drives etc).
>  This would force me to reconfigure the Services.cfg file of Nagios to
> conform to that right?

It could ... but it depends entirely on how your Nagios command is
implemented.

For example, I wrote my own Nagios command to check disks by their volume
names. It grabs the whole SNMP storage table table and looks up the
volumes I want by name, ignores the volumes I don't want, and makes note
of any missing or new volumes. As a bonus, when a target system is
reconfigured (e.g. a new volume is added), I get notified and I can either
set up a specific check for it, or in most cases it will get monitored by
a default rule in my command. I use the same exact Nagios command to
monitor volumes on my Solaris, Linux, Windows, and NetApp machines (adding
my SGIs and Tru64s will be easy). I am working on integrating it with SNMP
traps so that I get notified when a RAID disk fails, when a
snapshot/snapmirror fails, or if a backup fails and it will tell me which
volume it is in.

>               This seems like a big task for a changing
> environment with lots of servers (400+) like mine.  My real question is
> wouldn't most of this be avoided if I use the Nagios agents such as
> Nsclient, MRTGEXT.NLM and those for UNIX which use logical names for these
> same system objects (disks, RAM, CPU)?

I wouldn't want to suggest that Nagios agents are not the way to go.
People should always use the best tool for the job.

Where I work we have several layers of administrators with different
monitoring systems: BB, MRTG, Nagios, Spectrum, NetIQ, Tivoli, and a bunch
of vendor-specific tools (like DFM and CIM). Using SNMP, I don't need to
require other administrators install my agents, and I don't need to
install agents for other administrators. SNMP is definitely the right tool
for us.

thornton



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