Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
Zenoss
Zenoss is written in Python and has a browser-based user interface that uses Ajax
to make it faster and more productive. It can autodiscover resources on the net-
work, and it folds monitoring, alerting, trending, graphing, and recording historical
data into a unified tool. Zenoss uses SNMP to gather data from remote machines
by default, but it can also use SSH, and it has support for Nagios plugins. More
information is available at
http://www.zenoss.com
.
Hyperic HQ
Hyperic HQ is a Java-based monitoring system that is targeted more toward so-
called enterprise monitoring than most of the other systems in its class. Like
Zenoss, it can autodiscover resources and supports Nagios plugins, but its logical
organization and architecture are different, and it is a little “bulkier.” More infor-
mation can be found at
http://www.hyperic.com
.
OpenNMS
OpenNMS is written in Java and has an active developer community. It has the
usual features, such as monitoring and alerting, but adds graphing and trending
capabilities as well. Its goals are high performance and scalability, automation, and
flexibility. Like Hyperic, it is intended for enterprise monitoring of large, critical
systems. For more information, see
http://www.opennms.org
.
Groundwork Open Source
Groundwork Open Source combines Nagios and several other tools into one sys-
tem with a portal interface. Perhaps the best way to describe it is as the system you
might build in-house if you were an expert in Nagios, Cacti, and a host of other
tools and had a lot of time to integrate them together. More information is available
In addition to the all-in-one systems, there is a variety of software that's focused on
collecting metrics and letting you graph and visualize them, rather than performing
health checks. Many of these are built on top of RRDTool (
http://www.rrdtool.org
)
,
which stores time-series data in round-robin database (RRD) files. RRD files automat-
ically aggregate incoming data, interpolate missing values in case the incoming values
are not delivered when expected, and have powerful graphing tools that generate beau-
tiful, distinctive graphs. Several RRDTool-based systems are available. Here are some
of the most popular:
MRTG
The Multi Router Traffic Grapher, or MRTG (
http://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg/
)
, is the
quintessential RRDTool-based system. It is really designed for recording network
traffic, but it can be extended to record and graph other things as well.
Cacti
Cacti (
http://www.cacti.net
)
is probably the most popular RRDTool-based
system. It is a PHP web interface to RRDTool. It uses a MySQL database to define
the servers, plugins, graphs, and so on. It is template-driven, so you can define
