3 Open source monitoring programs

If in your work you are responsible for just one server, you will surely wonder: What is the best way to get the situation under control?

In the world there are good open source software that allow you to monitor the status of servers, services and programs.

In this article we’ll see an overview some of the software in this category, and in particular some related to Nagios

Nagios

In my view any product in this category must deal with Nagios, this project was born in 1996 and over time has established itself as one of the best open source monitoring projects.
The project is divided into  Nagios Core  and  and the paid version with support Nagios XI  that has some additional features.
Nagios Core is the monitoring and alerting engine that serves as the primary application around which hundreds of Nagios projects are built. It serves as the basic event scheduler, event processor, and alert manager for elements that are monitored. It features several APIs that are used to extend its capabilities to perform additional tasks, is implemented as a daemon written in C for performance reasons, and is designed to run natively on Linux/*nix systems.

Nagios XI extends on proven, enterprise-class Open Source components to deliver the best monitoring solution.

Features

• Monitoring of network services (SMTP, POP3, HTTP, NNTP, ICMP, SNMP, FTP, SSH)
• Monitoring of host resources (processor load, disk usage, system logs) on a majority of network operating systems, including Microsoft Windows with the NSClient++ plugin or Check_MK.
• Monitoring of anything else like probes (temperature, alarms…) which have the ability to send collected data via a network to specifically written plugins
• Monitoring via remotely-run scripts via Nagios Remote Plugin Executor
• Remote monitoring supported through SSH or SSL encrypted tunnels.
• Simple plugin design that allows users to easily develop their own service checks depending on needs, by using the tools of choice (shell scripts, C++, Perl, Ruby, Python, PHP, C#, etc.)
• Plugins available for graphing of data (Nagiosgraph, PNP4Nagios, and others available)
• Parallelized service checks available
• Ability to define network host hierarchy using “parent” hosts, allowing detection of and distinction between hosts that are down and those that are unreachable
• Contact notifications when service or host problems occur and get resolved (via e-mail, pager, SMS, or any user-defined method through plugin system)
• Ability to define event handlers to be run during service or host events for proactive problem resolution
• Automatic log file rotation
• Support for implementing redundant monitoring hosts
• Optional web-interface for viewing current network status, notifications, problem history, log files, etc.

If you are looking for a new monitoring software, Nagios is definitely the starting point for me; I appreciate it for its scalability, ease with which you can build your custom plugins and the huge community that develops new plugins or addons.

A demo is available at this url: http://demos.nagios.com/

Icinga

Icinga is a fork of Nagios and is backward compatible. So, Nagios configurations, plugins and addons can all be used with Icinga. Though Icinga retains all the existing features of its predecessor, it builds on them to add many long awaited patches and features requested by the user community.

Being a fairly new Nagios fork in Icing you’ll find all the features mentioned above, then what are the differences between the two?

At the moment the 2 main difference are:

1) Web interface – being written from scratch the Icinga interface look similar to the old Nagios web interface but add some interesting options, like dashboards and some commands extended to all service that you are viewing.

2) API – While addons in Nagios communicate with the core through various ways. For addons like PNP and Grapher, this is through performance data from the core, while NagVis receives data direct from the NDO database. Therefore when developers write addons for Nagios, they need to consider the best method of interacting with the core. In the case of writing addons for Icinga however, thanks to the in-built API developers need only to write with the API in mind. In effect the API does the work of “translating” different output formats for the developer. For example, the user sends a command in the web interface which is sent to the API.

A demo of icinga is available at this address.

Opsview

Opsview it’s a product “derivated” from Nagios, it’s use the Nagios core as engine for check and notification, some open source addon for Nagios and a custom Web interface. Opsview it’s available in 2 formats Opsview Community ed Opsview Enterprise.

As usual the community release it’s totally released under open source and it’s the testing platform for the Enterprise, that add official support and some proprietary module to the infrastructure.

Some of the enteprise modules are:

Reports

Brings report generation and automation capabilities to Opsview Enterprise.

Service Desk Connector

Integrates Opsview Enterprise edition with your service desk providing automated incident generation, reducing the delay between fault and response.

SMS Messaging

Sends SMS alerts direct from Opsview Enterprise, removing the dependency on your IT infrastructure and ensuring staff are notified of critical issues.

RANCID

Monitor your network device configuration, back-up your settings to a central location, track changes and generate alerts in Opsview Enterprise when changes occur.

A demo is available after registration at this url: http://www.opsview.com/products/online-demo
Or you can test a Virtual appliance with all already configured:

Virtual appliance
This virtual appliance version of Opsview Community on Ubuntu Server (32-bit) is designed to get you up and running as quickly as possible. You’ll need to download and configure the free VMware Player. You can also use VMware Server / ESX if you use the VMware Converter tool first.

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