Nagios as a replacement for HP OpenView

[Peter Edmonds]

Hi James,

Have a look at the following links about Nagios

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2002/12/05/essentialsysadmin.html

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2002/09/05/nagios.html

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2002/09/26/nagios.html

http://www.linux-magazine.com/issue/29/Nagios.pdf

As a short answer to your feature set question, Nagios can monitor anything,
assuming you have a plugin designed to check for the specific condition. You
can parse log files for regexs, write your own Perl scripts to parse files
etc.

Nagios plugins allow you to add performance data to the plugin output, so
you could get "event" type information about why a service is in the state
it is. There have been a few posts to the listg about event correlation, but
I haven't ventured into this area as of yet.

Event handlers for Nagios are described here

http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/1_0/eventhandlers.html

You can setup an event handler to respond to a specific service event and
automatically perform a pre-defined action. I have event handlers setup to
run remote commands via SSH on our Windows servers.

Peter Edmonds


> -----Original Message-----
> From: nagios-users-admin at lists.sourceforge.net
> [mailto:nagios-users-admin at lists.sourceforge.net]On Behalf Of Mohr James
> Sent: Thursday, April 01, 2004 6:31 PM
> To: Nagios-users at lists.sourceforge.net
> Subject: [Nagios-users] Nagios as a replacement for HP OpenView
>
>
> Hi All!
>
> I have been given the task of looking into OpenSource software as either
> a supplement to or replacement for HP OpenView. I have found a number of
> places that say things like "Nagios is not initially designed to be a
> Full Blown SNMP Monitoring and Control system like HP OpenView".
> However, I cannot go to my boss with a vague statement like that. So, I
> am initially looking for something that compares the two
> feature-by-feature, more or less. I did a search on google, but did not
> find anything very useful. Does anyone know of a feature comparision?
>
> One of the key aspects is that we have a number of applications that we
> need to monitor. For example, Apache, BEA WebLogic, and a number of our
> own applications. Among other things, monitoring consists of making sure
> the processes are running, parsing log files, etc. Based on the doc that
> I have read it seems that I would need to define a service for each
> application and then create our own plug-in that monitors the
> app/service and sets the status accordingly. Is this right, so far?
>
> One thing I am missing is that it appears as if services are "state"
> oriented and not "event" oriented. That is, you have the states good,
> warning, or bad but know nothing about the cause of any problems.  For
> example, our application could be "bad" because 5 different conditions.
> Would each of these 5 conditions be what appears in "Status
> Information"? Can I provide or send "messages" in the sense of OpenView
> that are event based? That is simply "Hey folks, XXX has just happened"?
>
>
> As I mentioned we need to monitor if certain processes are running and I
> came across the "Process Monitor Plugin". It talks about optionally
> restarting the process. Is the ability to start programs something built
> into Nagios or just this one plug-in. We have some many cases were
> automated actions are started when certain events occur. In many cases
> these are sent
>
> What about remotely starting actions from the console?  For example, a
> message comes that a certain condition exists, and we start an action
> that performs an additional check on the system. Or, a service stops and
> we do not want it to be automatically started. Instead we want to be
> able to start it on demand.
>
> I have also been looking for something that describe Nagios in abstract
> terms, rather than telling me how to configure it. Something along the
> lines of a schematic diagram of the various components, who communicates
> with whom, how they communicat, what processes are running where and so
> on.
>
> Any info is greatly appreaciated.
>
> Regards,
>
> Jim Mohr
>
>
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