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

[David Magda <dmagda@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Jan 5, 2008, at 03:04, Brad Knowles wrote:

> IMO, NetSNMP gets you the easy 80%, and the other 20% only comes  
> with some harder work with the platform-specific agents, and is  
> unlikely to give you a good return on your investment.

From what I'm hearing it looks like SNMP gets you basic (CPU, disk,  
memory) resource usage monitoring for event notification and long- 
term trending, but there may be some things that you want to monitor  
that it won't cover (e.g., response time of web servers, hardware- 
specific metrics like fan RPM and temperature).

(Net)SNMP can also check to see if processes are running (and there  
are the correct amount of them), but can't tell you if they're  
working properly. For those things a protocol-specific agent may be  
necessary to make sure things are working properly (or you use  
NetSNMP's "exec" directive to expand an existing OID).