Looking for a quick, cheap, simple network monitoring utility? Who isn't?
I've tried a few different setups. I've tried Netsaint/Nagios, Zenoss, straight MRTG, and now Cacti. Nothing really has everything that I'm looking for in a peice of software to do this work.
What am I looking for? Well I see two important peices to good network monitoring: trending, and alerting. Some would say that the ability for the software to executre remote functions or scripts is also important. Its important, however not in my top two.
Netsaint/Nagios - Nagios, the current product name, has been around for around 7 years or so is some version or another. It meets both of the top level requirements. It does a great job of service trending and alerting. It is a bit weak on the network utilization trending, but you can always bolt MRTG onto the web interface and get something workable. It has a great builtin web based data reporting interface, but can be quite cumbersome to get configured correctly. It requires a lot of work with individual text files, profiles, templates, etc. All in all, once its running its a great utility, but for those of us that have semi-dynamic networks it can become quite an arduous task to play keep up.
Zenoss - Zenoss is an open source project. Zenoss like Nagios has a pretty impressive web interface, and is capable of both service trending, and alerting. Through the use of some additional third party host agents, like informant, you are able to get quite a bit of data through the web interface with minimal customization. The issue with Zenoss is its lack of simplicity. The way that the graphs and hosts are displayed can be quite confusing, and at times almost impossible. I do believe that with some tweaking of some of the web layout, and a few changes to the config, it could be a bit more user friendly.
Cacti - Cacti is also an open source project. Cacti is extremly good at monitoring service trends as well as network utilization trending. Basically, anything that you can point an SNMP query at and get a response, it can trend. The only problem with cacti is that it doesn't alert, or I haven't found a way to get it alert. The interface is awesome, and the graphing layout is totally customizable from within the application itself. No Perl required! Cacti runs on Linux, and is also available as a virtual appliance to run on most virtualization platforms.
All three packages have their strengths and weaknesses. I personally like Cacti, and am looking for some type of bolt-on alerting module, as I believe it has the most intuitive interface, and is easily deployable on a virtual infrastructure.
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