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Comment by wdewind | Hacker News Reader

Stop using nagios, all you have to do is string together 6 random pieces of software, 2 of which don't exist yet!

2 of them are not available in nagios at all (graphing and anomaly detection) and 1 already sucks completely (UI), so I'm not sure this is a good way to look at the presentation.

Most nagios users configure the pnp4nagios plugin for graphing

...and some use Centreon, which bolts graphing and a better UI onto Nagios 'out of the box'

http://www.centreon.com/ ..or install via FAN: http://www.fullyautomatednagios.org/wordpress/

It isn't very clear to me which Nagios plug-ins are considered standard, and perhaps that sort of confusion is what creates all the FUD surrounding Nagios.

Use http://mathias-kettner.com/check_mk.html

Makes life so much better.

When two of the six points don't have answers, and one of those has "I will have to write something", it's pretty clear that the talk is not 'stop using Nagios right now', but 'what do we need to replace Nagios and do it right'. It's not a talk about a tool that is ready now.

Exactly. "Hey use Zabbix" is something only people who have never used Zabbix would recommend.

Nagios, and a host of other popular software that's difficult to use, exist because the alternatives are so poor.

Would you mind to elaborate on your problems with Zabbix?

We use it for a small ISP since nearly two years and are quite happy with it. All limitations that came up during integration could be fixed by writing some small scripts. Even upgrades worked.. :)

So if you have any Zabbix pain that might be waiting for us, please share.

Can it be completely driven by some configuration management tool and run without persistent storage? These are two parts of nagios that make it work for me. Granted, I didn't look too far, but some basic research says you need a database and have to manage everything via GUI.

Yea, you are right. On the other hand, you usually define the templates once and then it kinda works automatically via discovery.

The data is stored inside a relational database, which might become a problem in the future.

They do offer an API that is quite usable. I've build a simplified interface for our less trained staff members with it.

You won't find any RRD files which might be a problem for you. Until now that was only a theoretical problem for us.

Or just one. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinken_(software)

Shinken was written by Jean Gabès as a proof of concept for a new Nagios architecture. Believing the new implementation was faster and more flexible than the old C code, he proposed it as the new development branch of Nagios 4.[3] This proposal was turned down by the Nagios authors, so Shinken became an independent network monitoring software application compatible with Nagios

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