Nagvis alternatives

[Israel Brewster]

On Sep 3, 2008, at 1:25 AM, Alex Dehaini wrote:

> Have you used it in production environment before. What are the  
> disadvantages and advantages over nagvis?

Yeah, we were running nexsm on our network of about 300 devices - not  
huge, but not tiny. The main advantage that I found was ease of  
configuration. With nexsm, it starts with the map fully populated with  
all network devices and links, and you can simply drag the devices  
around to where you want them. With nagvis, it starts off with an  
empty map, and you have to manually place every device AND every link.  
If you are just trying to populate a server room or something, this is  
fine, and probably even easer than the nexsm approach (where you would  
have to tell it to hide all the unwanted hosts), but when you are  
trying to map 300 or so devices, plus links, it quickly becomes  
prohibitively time consuming. And while you can reposition devices in  
nagvis by dragging (although I have had no end of trouble getting that  
to work), they aren't attached to their links, so you have to manually  
reposition BOTH the device and any links to/from the device. This  
isn't an issue with nexsm.

I also found the display in nexsm to be easier to use- you can easily  
zoom in and out to see more or less of the map (if you can do this in  
nagvis, I haven't discovered how), and the map can be as large as you  
want- nagvis (from what I can tell) is limited to the size of the  
background image you choose. Although I do prefer the icon sets with  
nagvis over nexsm- nexsm uses the image you set in the nagios config.

Finally, I prefer nexsm over nagvis for performance issues, although  
admittedly I suspect this is due to mysql, not nagvis itself. On the  
system I am using, I have found that when nagios is dumping stuff to  
the database, mysql uses pretty much all available processing power,  
and nagios hangs waiting for it to complete. Nexsm just reads the  
nagios logs directly, and while it is java, which uses a fair amount  
of processor, it's not as bad as mysql, at least on my OS. Also, when  
running nagvis, nagios has a tendency to stop updating completely  
every day or two, and can't be restarted until I kill the ndo2db  
daemon. I never had issues like that with nexsm- probably because it  
was just passively reading the log files, rather than trying to use an  
active event broker in nagios. Nexsm also just "feels" simpler to me-  
nagvis consists of an event broker module, a ndo2db daemon, the mysql  
server (although that might already be running somewhere for something  
else) and the web front end. nexsm is "just" a single java applet.

Keep in mind though that my opinions may be at least partially based  
on incomplete or incorrect knowledge of nagvis. While I used nexsm  
extensively until we moved to nagios 3, I have never actually managed  
to get nagvis running acceptably. The three separate occasions I tried  
it have all been non-starters. The last time I got it running for a  
couple of days, but between the above mentioned performance issues,  
and never really being able to get the maps configured the way I  
wanted, we quickly took it offline. Also it is entirely possible that  
my desired usage (as a full-network overview) is better suited for  
nexsm than nagvis, and a different usage might work better with  
nagvis. But so far, for us, nagvis has proven to not be sutable.

-----------------------------------------------
Israel Brewster
Computer Support Technician
Frontier Flying Service Inc.
5245 Airport Industrial Rd
Fairbanks, AK 99709
(907) 450-7250 x293
-----------------------------------------------
>
>
> Lex
>
> On Tue, Sep 2, 2008 at 11:20 PM, Israel Brewster <israel at frontierflying.com 
> > wrote:
> On Sep 2, 2008, at 8:34 AM, Alex Dehaini wrote:
>
>> Hi Guys,
>>
>> Are there other projects like nagvis?
>
> If you are still running nagios 2, nexsm ( http://nexsm.sf.net ) is  
> an excellent option, one that I highly preferred over nagvis for a  
> number of reasons. Doesn't work with nagios 3, however. I Don't know  
> how hard it would be to fix (I suspect it is just a log parsing  
> issue, but I don't know), but it is written in java, which I don't  
> know, and the developer hasn't had time to work on it lately. Oh well.
>
> -----------------------------------------------
> Israel Brewster
> Computer Support Technician
> Frontier Flying Service Inc.
> 5245 Airport Industrial Rd
> Fairbanks, AK 99709
> (907) 450-7250 x293
> -----------------------------------------------
>>
>>
>> -- 
>> Alex Dehaini
>> Developer
>> Site - www.alexdehaini.com
>> Email - alexdehaini at gmail.com
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>
>
>
>
> -- 
> Alex Dehaini
> Developer
> Site - www.alexdehaini.com
> Email - alexdehaini at gmail.com

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