GroundWork Open Source
Are you afraid of nagios because of the config files? Don’t worry you’re not alone. GroundWork to the resuce! GroundWork is a set of packages that takes the pain out of configuration for nagios. It’s a web based GUI that supports importing existing nagios configs, audo discovery of servers and much more. I hate for this to sound like an advertisement for GroundWork but it does solve most of my major complaints about nagios. The most important of which is that it’s a pain to setup and configure. GroundWork with basic checks can be setup on a friday afternoon.
I do have a few complaints. First the configuration EZ and configuration sub menus aren’t logical. Configuration doesn’t have commit. In order for any changes to take effect you have to go back to the Configuration EZ menu. This should really be changed to have configuration basic and advanced, both with commit capability. Easy is essentially worthless.
Another issue is the use of RRD for performance historical data. This paragraph deserves it’s own post and I’ll write it some day. For now I’ll just cover the main issue I have not with RRD itself but the way RRD is used most of the time. RRD is purely for round robin data. Historical performance data is not round robin. Hell it has “history” right in the name. This data should be kept as long as possible. It’s useful for planning capacity for future events based on previous events. Aggregating away history data into month or year graphs means it’s impossible to go back and see what traffic looked like on dec 25th 2005 or any other random date(s) because RRD has either purged it or aggregated it away into a yearly view. I know it’s possible to disable the aggregation on rrd but the preallocation of data files makes this impractical for long term data storage and constantly changing servers and services. Once again RRD is a fine tool for what’s it meant to be used for it’s just not meant for historical data.
Anyway if you like nagios but are afraid of the configs give GroundWork a try. Beware! If you install it on a server with and existing apache package GroundWork will overwrite /etc/init.d/httpd