[olug] Open source monitoring system?

[Chris St. Pierre]

On Wed, 15 Apr 2009, Jay Hannah wrote:

> If you were going to start over today what open source monitoring
> system would you install to watch your servers / disk / processes /
> etc and do paging / email notifications, and escalation?

I use Nagios, and love it.  I'd absolutely use it again.

Things I particularly love about it:

- Plain-text configuration lends itself to version control and is easy
   to automate.  I wrote a Cfengine module that automates 99% of my
   Nagios config and checks it in to Subversion.

- Plugins are dead simple to write.  I can't count how many I've written
   from scratch myself.

- NDOUtils makes integration with Nagios sexy as hell.  I just wrote a
   Drupal module that grabs service status data out of the NDOUtils
   database, aggregates it into a few broad "services" (e.g., the
   "Email" service is composed of a few dozen checks) and exposes that
   simplified data to end users.

- NEB, the interface used to write NDOUtils, is insanely, stupidly
   powerful.  Check out Dave Josephson's columns in the October 2008
   and December 2008 issues of _;login:_.  Unfortunately, it's a C
   API, but the power ... mwahahaha.

Summary: I <3 Nagios.

Chris St. Pierre
Unix Systems Administrator
Nebraska Wesleyan University