[Discuss] Open Source Monitoring

[matt at mattshields.org (Matt Shields)]

I've been a longtime supporter of Nagios (and more recently Icinga) and
Cacti, but I've become extremely frustrated with the complexity it takes to
manage extremely large installations.  It usually starts out fine but when
you've got a lot of people in it, it gets messy.  Nagios also should have
built in graphing and tie in Cacti to Nagios is messy at best.  Recently I
checked out Groundworks (gwos.com) and was impressed with their ability to
tie in a lot of different open source tools into a single system.  But
their price nearly gave me a heart attack.

Has anyone used and recommend some of the lesser known Open Source
monitoring/trending/alerting systems out there such as Zabbix, PandoraFMS,
OpenNMS, Zenoss, etc.  I'm looking for the ability to easily write/port
Nagios plugins and have a collection of standard ones for both Linux and
Windows, reporting/trending, ability to create useful dashboards for a NOC,
and my biggest is the ability like Groundworks to have an agent that when a
new node comes online after imaging checks into the server and based on
hostname (using regex) automatically add itself to a hostgroup and start
monitoring the appropriate resources.


Matt