Zenoss versus Zabbix

[Robert Brockway]

On Fri, 23 Apr 2010, John Miles wrote:

> Does anyone have any experiences with using Zenoss, Zabbix, or something
> else for that matter as a management and monitoring interface for Linux
> servers?

I've trialed just about every OSS option there is when it comes to alert & 
performance monitoring.

For alert monitoring I've used Nagios for years.

I've never been super happy with any of the performance monitoring options 
I've used.   Cacti is great if you stick to the defaults but writing 
custom checks is much harder than it should be.

What I really want is a tool that can do both fairly we..

I tried Zabbix a few weeks ago and found it to be way to chatty by 
default.  I let it talk to a couple of boxes over the 'net and it was 
chewing up 1GB/box/day in traffic.  It can be slowed down but I have to 
wonder when the default is so far from sensible.

Also, it doesn't autodetect hardware on the client machines - although you 
can use templates to deal with this if you have a lot of identical 
machines.

Also by default it doesn't count total network traffic - that is just 
weird.

I tried Zenoss briefly but moved on quickly.

collectd is a decent daemon that collects data and stores it as rrd or 
csv.  Various GUIs are available and it integrates with Nagios although I 
haven't tried that yet.

The latest one I'm trying is opsview (http://www.opsview.org/) which is 
actually an open source application made up of existing apps, integrated 
together with a new gui.

Cheers,

Rob

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