Re: [SAGE] zenoss versus nagios

["Paul Lathrop" <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Nell,

I highly recommend Nagios over Zenoss. Recently I had the opportunity
to deploy a monitoring architecture from scratch for a company I
consult for. We did our evaluation and with all the touted features
Zenoss came out on top. Deployment was much easier than Nagios, and
setting up monitors was a breeze. Unfortunately as we dug deeper into
Zenoss functionality we ran into a number of problems. First, the
feature set as documented just doesn't seem to be there.
Auto-discovery of devices never worked despite hours of attempts
including digging through the source to try to figure out how it was
*supposed* to work. Modeling only seems to work correctly if you are
using two specific devices (Dell and HP servers). The documentation
makes it sound as though Zenoss makes it easy to decouple services
from devices (important when your website doesn't run on any one
server, but rather uses a server farm with load balancing, etc.)
Sadly, that is not the case. Any monitors that weren't already baked
in were extremely difficult to deploy. There was no way of setting a
monitoring schedule, and no documentation about what the schedule
would be by default. Documentation of Zenoss looks good, but it turns
out to be made up of screenshots and describing the obvious, rather
than any attempt to describe how to use it, or practical examples on
making things work. Finally, the interface, while slick-looking, was
buggy and unresponsive. We might have forged forward and attempted to
be good open-source citizens and help correct these issues, but there
were a couple of deal breakers. First, the monitoring just didn't
work. We ran several fire drills where Zenoss reported the problem but
failed to notice the resolution. One time, just out of curiousity, I
left it alone for 24 hours before deciding it really wasn't going to
pick up the fact that the issue was resolved. Second, attempts to seek
assistance from the community and developers were generally met with
silence, unless the question was already an FAQ. All in all, I think
the Zenoss developers spent too much time trying to make a pretty
interface and the marketing folks got carried away describing features
that aren't there.

Nagios is clunky, it is ugly, it is a pain to configure. It also
works. So far, I haven't found any other Open Source monitoring system
that does monitoring at least as well as Nagios, much less better or
easier. I say stick with Nagios.

--Paul Lathrop

On Jan 3, 2008 7:10 AM, Neil Watson <sage@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I'm beginning to plan a migration from an old Nagios 1 server to perhaps
> Nagios 3.  It appears that much has changed from version 1 to 3 meaning
> that at least some of the configurations will have to be altered or even
> created anew.  Last summer I helped to write a comparison on monitoring
> systems.  In that paper Nagios was a front running but Zenoss came out
> on top.  Now I'm considering migrating to Zenoss instead of Nagios 3.
>
> Does anyone here have practical experience with Zenoss?  How does it
> compare with Nagios?  Is it worth switching to?
>
> --
> Neil Watson             | Debian Linux
> System Administrator    | Uptime 4 days
> http://watson-wilson.ca
>