[c-nsp] Free NMS Tools

[Phil Mayers]

Mario Spinthiras wrote:
> I would say Zenoss is looking good because of the inventory management you
> can do and because of the logical structure it puts everything in. I wrote
> an old dusty article a long long time ago on NMSs , maybe you can take a
> peak.
> http://www.spinthiras.org/2008/07/network-monitoring/
> 
> Everything else just seems inadequate or poor.
> 
> And for goodness sake don't put nagios because it will take ages to
> configure :)

Heh. In all seriousness though... it depends on your monitoring paradigm.

For example: many people use autodiscovery and friends to configure 
their monitoring, or manual configurations.

We do the opposite. We have a single central registration database. All 
hosts (and I do mean all) get entered into it. The nagios config is 
built *from* that database. Rather than edit the config, you make the 
database "be correct".

So, we spend essentially zero time configuring nagios. It's (re)built 
once every 5 minutes automatically.