A Google search for "server monitoring" returns ~8.8 million results. From that list we used the following (sometimes company-specific) rules to narrow it down a bit.
- Open Source - 5AM stands firmly behind open-source software, and we use it (any try to contribute back to it) as much as we possibly can
- Community Support - we're going to need some help from the community to get where we need to go. We want that community to be involved and helpful, if not large.
- Linux - We run linux servers (almost) exclusively, and want this app to run (well) on Linux
- Postgres - we would like (but don't have to have) a database-agnostic, and if not that, then to be able to run with a Postgres backend
- Networking AND Systems - while Cacti is great, it doesn't handle servers very well. We want something that can do both.
- Flexible, REALLY Flexible - While Nagios may call itself the standard, we think writing plugins for it STINKS. We want to be able to quickly monitor anything we think of.
- Low setup / maintenance overhead - We don't want to make a career out of maintaining our monitoring system.
- Historical Data - We want it.
- Graphs - We need them. Everybody is a visual learner when you're staring at 6 months worth of processor idle time values.
Some of the highlights:
- The server was up and listening within 10 minutes. 1 config file to alter and you're rocking on the server end with hundreds of checks in dozens of default templates
- The agent install is similarly easy. One config file and it's off.
- Anything you can output to the command-line can become a value to be evaluated and tracked. EASILY.
- Had an ASA 5505 up and monitored for SNMP data in less than 10 minutes.
- An increasingly well-performing web frontend. speedy, pretty, and intuitive (as intuitive as any of these tools are these days)
- LDAP integration was super easy
- JSON-RPC based API with community supported Python bindings
- While it works with PostgreSQL it's definitely aimed towards MySQL. PostgreSQL can be a little bit squirrely. But we're working on it.
- It can't currently inherit LDAP users/groups
- the frontend is in PHP. We'd love to see a more powerful language for a web portal of such a powerful tool.
- The API is great to push information into Zabbix. Pulling information OUT? Not quite as easy or straightforward.
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