Nagios vs Zabbix vs Zenoss

[diego_82]

Hi all. I've to decide which of this monitoring tools is good enought for me. I'd like to spend my time on the most used one (which I think is Nagios), but I'd like to know which of these is better for you.

Let's the flame starts

[drescherjm]

I use nagios (well for a few weeks) but I really like the looks of Zabbix.

For what I am using nagios for I would like more alert conditions. Nagios only has OK, Warning and Caution. I would also like some/better control of the contents of alert message.

In one case I am monitoring the receipt of files via the dicom protocol so when some files come in I get messages like the following:

[gimpel]

Zabbix is pretty great and pretty easy to configure.
We test-monitored a bunch of Linux and Windows-Servers with it, and it worked fine. But for monitoring our web-pages and certain web-app functionality, it wasn't really usable - all I say is: proxy.
The report/alert capabilities are great though.

Nagios, is super fexible and extendable. But it is a real pain to get configured in the first place, especially when you have to configure way over 50 servers, heck. And well, it does not really look that advanced. At least it can monitor our web stuff just fine even from behind the proxy...
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[LoSeR_5150]

I went with Nagios at my work. Monitor 45 hosts and 73 services currently. It is a pain to configure/setup but once the initial setup is finished making changes really isn't that bad. Also there is some front end for it, I forget who makes it that does some sorta web configuration if you aren't into conf files. Personally I'd just bite the bullet and do the setup by hand. It works well for us, monitoring everything from switches, routers, web-servers, jabber-servers, e-mail servers, etc... Hope this helps.
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[aronparsons]

I've used Nagios for many years, but haven't tried the alternatives because I've felt no need to. Nagios is not difficult to configure once you know what you should be doing (the documentation is quite good IMO). Just be sure to utilize templates wherever possible and your configuration files will be simple to use. If you're not sure of a setting, just leave the defaults as is; unless you're in a highly complex environment where performance becomes an issue because of the number of hosts/services, you shouldn't need to tweak much to have a robust monitoring system in place. Another plus is the ease of adding new scripts for monitoring. If you're well-versed in a scripting language (Perl is my go-to choice), you can monitor just about anything you can imagine within a few minutes.

[xming]

I did a big scale nagios setup (300+ servers: Linux, AIX, Windows and Soalris), it was rather easy to deploy, once you have figure out how to do it for a particular group of servers. But nagios is certainly not user-friendly.
On a smaller scale (xen vms) I tried zabbix and it worked w/o that I have to invest to much time leraning it.
At home (also xen vms) I tried zenoss, it's the worst, it's a nightmare to setup if you are going to use Gentoo, it's a resource hog, and it's way to difficult to get it the way I want it to be. It has a nice/beautifulk interface and that's it.
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[diego_82]

Well, I have some problems with the external plugins with Nagios, and, btw, the default interface of Nagios is a bit ugly .

Anyone had tried Zenoss?

[ShaneCar]

Zenoss beats Nagios is UI and config ease. However, falls short in reliability and detail. Nagios has the largest ecosystem for plug-ins and integrations. As an open source tool, Nagios is a good base for your monitoring environment. Since Nagios monitors pretty much everything, I would look at alert correlation tools like BigPanda - https://bigpanda.io/integrations/nagios-the-alternative-to-a-flood-of-alerts - to suppress the noise while still being able to see all the details. You may also want to look into a routing tool like Pagerduty. Pagerduty integrates with Nagios out of the box and efficiently routes and auto escalates alerts to the right monitoring teams.
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[yoshi314]

i mostly use check_mk . especially since endpoints are pretty much non-effort wrt configuration.
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