Re: SNMP vs. agents (was: [SAGE] zenoss versus nagios)

[Stephen L Johnson <sjohnson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 2008-01-03 at 20:12 -0500, David Magda wrote:
> On a related note: do people find SNMP or agent-based systems  
> "better"? Or, what are the trade-offs between the two?
> 
> Some things (network equipment) can only have SNMP, so that's the  
> only way to collect resource and statistical data from them, but for  
> Windows and Unix-y hosts, is there a difference? (I believe some FOSS  
> monitoring software also supports Windows' WMI.)
> 
> Thanks for any info / war stories.

I've developed in a systems monitoring systems several years ago
(http://spong.sf.net/ if interested. No longer actively supported). From
a developer point of view, SNMP is good for network related data
gathers. For system monitoring, I avoid SMNP agents. The problem is no
consistency. I've works with most every flavor of UNIX under the sun. It
seems that every vendor implement the Host MIB in their own way, or in
an entirely different location in the tree (HPUX). I've always preferred
to have a client running on the host so I can get consistent data know
format coming into the Central monitoring system.  That way I can
isolate the local idiosyncrasies in location. 

-- 
Stephen L Johnson <sjohnson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>