I’ve spent a good part of this week evaluating various solutions for monitoring and managing Linux servers. There are many solutions that meet some of the needs, but I have not found a single product that does everything I need. Without going into significant detail, here are my needs:
- Simple service up/down monitoring and alerting
- Detailed metrics for disk, CPU, memory, network, etc
- Storage and graphing of historical data
- Flexible creation of custom monitors, triggers, etc.
- Significant pre-configured monitors, triggers, etc.
- Deployment/upgrade/removal of packages
- Configuration management
- Inventory of hardware/software
- Rich access control to satisfy various distributed administration and audit requirements
- *ALL* functionality exposed by web interface
- Inexpensive, preferably open source
- Able to scale to several hundred, maybe thousands of Linux servers – and possibly even Windows servers.
- Should be developed in a language I know so I can modify myself – (C, Perl, Python, Java)
- Should run on Debian, though it does not need to be in the repo.
Candidate solutions:
- Nagios
- OCS-Inventory
- Hyperic
- Puppet
- Zabbix
Conclusion:
Nothing definitive yet, but I’m narrowing in on a combination of Zabbix and Puppet. I am still looking for something to automate the collection of inventory data, but I think this could be done using the Zabbix API to populate the Zabbix inventory (which is otherwise a manual process).
LazyWeb – any opinions?
