Best OSS Systems Mgmt App You Never Heard Of

FLOSSisnot4Teeth writes "You probably are familiar with Nagios and Webmin as two of the most widely deployed open source systems management applications. However, this month's SourceForge.net Project of the Month is probably a newcomer to open source systems and network administrators. Zenoss Core is a systems monitoring platform, released under GPL and over the last year it's become one of the most popular SF.net projects. Unlike most of these new "commercially backed" open source projects, Zenoss Core is the only version, their corporate sponsor doesn't offer a "pro version". Also their developers have been committing code back to other projects like RRDTool and Twisted. I have been playing around with Zenoss for about six months and have been totally impressed. Would be curious to see what other Slashdot readers think." SourceForge.net and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.

Re:other contenders

[fimbulvetr]

You forgot hobbit. Which is a gpl version of bb, written in c (much, much, much faster). Support for clients on servers (so you don't have nasty snmp everywhere). Integrated rrd, "smart" checks (i.e. looks for status 200 w/ http, looks for +OK on tcp/110 connections, etc. It doesn't just check that a port is open).

Project's demo:

http://www.hswn.dk/hobbit/ [www.hswn.dk]

ZABBIX

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you ever heard of ZABBIX [zabbix.com]? I believe this is the best Open Source monitoring solution around. It is a mature and flexible piece of software which comes with very impressive feature set.

Re:Advertise on Slashdot.org -- It's Free!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well that generally is the way that open source projects get contributors — users play with the software for a while, get interested and start submitting patches.

It's pretty good!

[wireloose]

I'm using Nagios on a group of core network devices. I have to be super careful not to perform an "up2date" on it (using RH 4.0 EL) because the Nagios packages always overwrite my config files. But Nagios is good, and it's been very useful. It took me a few days of work to get it set up the way I wanted, and it's been a charm ever since.

A few weeks ago someone posted an article on the top ten OSS projects to watch, and Zenoss was one of those projects. I downloaded it to experiment. I had it up and running in about 20 minutes, on Ubuntu. It's far more powerful at its ability to gather data from nodes. And setup is far less manual. Network discovery worked very well. It found devices on our network that we didn't know were out there. It required no integration with other packages. The interface is also more intuitive in some areas, such as viewing event histories. But, it's more challenging to find performance charts the first few times.

I especially liked the automatic snmp walk through the MIBS on each device. This makes it much easier to pull statistics from it, without having to edit text files. The MRTG-style charts are also good. I wish they were more readily configurable. I also wish there were more MIBS in the distribution, but you can find most by carefully searching equipment provider's web sites.

All in all, After running it side by side with my Nagios setup for a couple of weeks, I like it much better. And I'm moving more SNMP agents into my network just because of Zenoss.