Aug 212012
 

This is an article of mine, first published on Wazi

Every organization must monitor its infrastructure’s uptime and performance. While the popular Nagios application is a good general-purpose monitoring program that you can extend with plugins to handle just about any task, you may do even better by employing Cacti as a graphical front end to RRDTool‘s data logging and graphing functionality. Cacti was developed specifically to monitor and collect performance information, while Nagios is more oriented toward state changes, such as noting whether a daemon is up or down.

RRDTool stores all of the necessary information to create graphs and populate them with data in a MySQL database. Cacti provides templates to gather and show information such as system load (CPU, RAM, disks), users connected, MySQL load, and Apache load, all of which can affect the performance of your site.

Cacti’s front end is completely PHP-driven. It supports data gathering via different methods such as scripts in any language and SNMP.

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May 132012
 

Even this year I was in Bolzano (Italy) for the annual conference organized by Wuerth-Phoenix on Monitoring with Open Source products.

I found the conference very interesting, with speakers from around the world that have described several open source products and best practices on monitoring but also on configuration and management tools. A big surprise for me has been the strong push for alternatives softwares to Nagios for monitoring in particular Shinken and Icinga have received many praise.

But before I give some more details about the presentations a few words about the company that has hosted about 400 people in their, free of charge, event, Wuerth-Phoenix manufactures and markets an appliance called NetEye, within there are many Open source products including:

Nagios Core, with many preinstalled plugins, Cacti, ocsinventory, GLPI, NfSen, Nedi, and DocuWiki the highest level version has also OTRS, all these software are integrated with some web management interface developed by Wuerth-Phoenix itself. Continue reading »

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