1

I'm new to Network and Monitoring side and I've to work on either OpenNMS or Nagios.

I want to know what are the main differences of these two Systems apart from being OpenSource and Licensed. Which one is better and why? (from installation, configuration, management, usability, reliability, features, advantages, disadvantages point of view).

Edit: Also please tell me if there is any other system which is better or equal to above systems.

my requirements are basic monitoring of my nodes. I need to see what nodes are up and down and what services each node has.

Kashif
  • 493
  • 9
  • 20
  • 1
    While we can try and help you get them installed. We cant really tell you which one you should use, both are excellent. – Sirch May 03 '12 at 22:32
  • Thanks. I've installed OpenNMS and trying to learn it... but don't know how to compare it with Nagios, on which basis... what features i should look into to have a good comparison – Kashif May 03 '12 at 22:35
  • Those two are not mutually exclusive, as they don't perform identical functions. You may even consider using both. – John Gardeniers May 03 '12 at 23:47
  • Both will work for "basic" monitoring (ping & ports) - A feature-by-feature comparison of these tools isn't a good fit for a question-and-answer site: You can do this research easily by visiting both websites and comparing them for yourself. Similarly listing other tools which are "better or equal" is hard (Better *how*? Equal *under what circumstances*?), and also off topic as a [shopping question](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/11/qa-is-hard-lets-go-shopping/). If you have specific questions on how to do `X` in monitoring system `Y` though I'm sure we can help with that. – voretaq7 May 04 '12 at 02:52
  • nagios is for monitoring, opennms for your inventory. – sjas Mar 23 '15 at 12:48

1 Answers1

4

It depends heavily on your environment. I like OpenNMS for SNMP monitoring, alerts/notifications, reporting, escalations and as an Up/Down dashboard. The graphs are so-so. I use other products for more detailed graphs.

OpenNMS has a steep learning curve and needs some massaging in order to fit your environment. However, out of the box, it will auto-discover devices and start collecting + report on outages. It's up to you to define thresholds and detailed reports. If you have devices that are SNMP-capable or you only care about Up/Down, OpenNMS is good. It's free, but the consulting packages are expensive. The community support is not as good as it used to be, but you'll usually be able to find that most of the problems you'll encounter have been solved somewhere.

Others will speak to Nagios, but I feel that the setup and scalability can be an issue in certain environments. But at the same time, it has good community support and industry mindshare.

ewwhite
  • 197,159
  • 92
  • 443
  • 809