| mayoung@lawtonps.org 12 May 2007 |
Having used Nagios (Netsaint) and OpenNMS in the past my exposure to ZenOSS was preceeded by extremely high expectations, and I can honestly say they have been well exceeded by this product. Setup and configuration is a breeze to anyone familiar with Linux, and I have crawled a network of hundreds of Cisco devices and a variety of servers in a matter of minutes to populate the initial device list. Instant alerts are critical to any sysop that wants to be informed before users are affected, and the ability to create your own alert conditions does just that. Want to know when the hard drive array has less then 20% remaining? Just setup an alert. Want to know if CPU threshold is exceeding 80%? Setup an alert.
Not quite all is peachy from the get-go though. You have to take some extra steps to enable SSL encryption for the web interface, and the program is heavily dependent on the quality of SNMP agents you use; not a fault of ZenOSS, but some recommended SNMP agents are less informative then others (SNMP Informant for Windows servers can be on par and sometimes better then Linux SNMP support, but requires tweaking to utilize all of ZenOSS's features).
Overall, this is and has been my top choice for network monitoring since I was first introduced to it...and it is installed on an old network appliance with a tiny fraction of the processing power and memory of a modern server without a single hiccup. |
