Monitoring Software

Question

I'm looking for recommendations based on real-life experience about the best software for monitoring Service.

Feature expecte should be:

• Open Source (Nagios based, because my custumer want so :-))
• Service status, (running both on Linux, Windows, different kinds of Unix, Cisco, etc.)
• Ability to prevent downtimes
• SNMPv3 support
• Alerts
• Data export
• Well-Documented
• Active community
• Ready for corporate environment
• Graphics
• ITIL compliance (Service Desk, Incident Management, Service Level Management, Capacity Management, IT Service Continuity , Management, Availability Management, ICT infrastructure Management).

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Why not use nagios itself? It still works great and is widely documented and supported.

• open source - of course
• Service status across platforms - nagios has agents that can run on almost anything
• Ability to prevent downtimes - active monitoring is key to minimizing downtime. Totally avoiding downtime requires an architecture with no single pounts of failure.
• SNMPv3 support - available in plugins
• Alerts - that's what it is all about. Consider integrating with PagerDuty to get nice scheduling and apps for alerting.
• Data export - plugins are available that will slice your data in every way you can imagine.
• Well-Documented - there are a slew of books written about nagios
• Active community - still being actively developed
• Ready for corporate environment - nagios is actively used by corporations and some big tech names
• Graphics - nagios is web based. Other tools, like icinga, include more graphs, but this functionality slows them down and makes them less scalable. Using graphite or a third-party provider for graphs would be better.
• ITIL compliance - sadly this is not builtin to nagios, but there is this plugin which should help on the inventory side. I'd love to see more ITIL compliance in nagios and other open source tools, but this isn't going to happen when the ITIL specs are proprietary and expensive.

Answer 2

The only thing that really comes to mind for me is ScienceLogic, but it doesn't satisfy the first point of being open source. Iirc, it is capable of monitoring systems using the Nagios agent though. It can get pretty pricey, but it does address pretty much everything else on your list quite nicely.

It's been several years since I've used it personally... I miss it.

Answer 3

Have you looked at Icinga? I have no personal experience with it, but it was a topic during the last local linux user group meeting.

Icinga2 is a complete rewrite, while the previous version was a fork of nagios.

From the homepage:

Icinga is a scalable and extensible monitoring system which checks the availability of your resources, notifies users of outages and provides extensive BI data.

I have chosen to not use it, but I don't have the constraint "nagios based" :-)

Answer 4

What about Reaction?
It doesn't satisfy all your requirements but it might be worth a shot.

You can

• monitor application
• automatically resolve the incident by predefined execution flows (or after a confirmation of an administrator)
• execute / schedule execution flows (which are a chain of commands)
• watch statistics

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original requirements and how they are met:

• Open Source: it is free and open source but not Nagios based
• Service status, (running both on Linux, Windows, different kinds of Unix, Cisco, etc.): yes
• Ability to prevent downtimes: not sure what it means, can be monitored which worker (agent) is down
• SNMPv3 support: mail support is provided
• Alerts: via mails
• Data export: yes
• Well-Documented: yes
• Active community: it has been recently released
• Ready for corporate environment: more info needed
• Graphics: web GUI management app is provided
• ITIL compliance: no