I assist a company that looks after many networking and a few windows and VMware machines. I had setup a Nagios instance that was doing all the monitoring, but was a little cumbersome to manage and others who are not quite so Nagios literate needed to make changes as well, and so we had setup NagiosQL, which was working OK, but not quite what we wanted.
After a short discussion we decided to change to Zenoss. Because I was using NagiosQL and we had everything sorted into various groups, I was able to write a bunch of SQL that grabbed all the needed bits that I could pass to zendisc to easily add all the hosts.
The other cool thing about Zenoss, is that it has the ability to run Nagios plugins, and it is pretty easy to setup as well. There are tons of examples on internet just google.
The good thing about Zenoss was that it does a lot of auto-discovery, so it wasn’t long before we had graphs and a whole stack more monitoring points.
We went through and checked that all our existing points were being monitored, and where they weren’t, we either added them, or added the nagios plugin.
One drawback (which is a little obvious with the extra data) is all the extra data that is travelling across the wire because of all the extra monitoring points and graphs.
Last thing to do is migrate the alerting, I’ll let you know how we go with that in a future post.