Moving from a commercial product to Nagios

[Jason Martin]

On Fri, Feb 04, 2005 at 10:03:09PM +0100, Mohr James wrote:
> administrative aspects. For example, how many people were on the project
> team, how much time was spent per time, how long the process lasted
> (i.e. in months), any pitfalls and problems, etc.

It is very important to remember that Nagios is a service
monitor, not an event management console. Nagios is designed to
actively go out and check on the status of individal items,
unlike a EM system that passively waits for data and reacts to
whatever comes in. The implementation paradigm is very
different.

If the machines being monitored cross administrative domains
then there will be disagreement over who controls the Nagios
configuration. Nagios doesn't include any sort of config
management interface (it reads config from text files at
startup, no way to change just one service w/o restarting the
whole process), and the config management addons are all very
single-user oriented.  

A single instance of Nagios will experience problems monitoring
thousands of hosts, depending on how many services are on each
host. Distributed monitoring helps some but the CGI's will
experience significant performance problems.There are some
addons to assist with that.

Managing the distribution of plugins can also be a challenge. I
recommend CFEngine (www.cfengine.org) to help with that.

-Jason Martin
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