What Would You Want In a Large-Scale Monitoring System?

Krneki writes "I've been developing monitoring solutions for the last five years. I have used Cacti, Nagios, WhatsUP, PRTG, OpManager, MOM, Perl-scripts solutions, ... Today I have changed employer and I have been asked to develop a new monitoring solution from scratch (5,000 devices). My objective is to deliver a solution that will cover both the network devices, servers and applications. The final product must be very easy to understand as it will be used also by help support to diagnose problems during the night. I need a powerful tool that will cover all I need and yet deliver a nice 2D map of the company IT infrastructure. I like Cacti, but usually I use it only for performance monitoring, since pooling can't be set to 5 or 10 sec interval for huge networks. I'm thinking about Nagios (but the 2D map is hard to understand), or maybe OpManager. What monitoring solution do you use and why?"

Comments

I Name My Devices After Al Qaeda Members

[Philip K Dickhead]

Publish them in DNS, and have the NSA monitor them for me!

Re:I Name My Devices After Al Qaeda Members

[just_another_sean]

I was going to suggest he should ask the UK government, but I like your idea better.

Re:I Name My Devices After Al Qaeda Members

[Philip K Dickhead]

The only drawback to this comes in the form of UAVs.

Re:I Name My Devices After Al Qaeda Members

[Hurricane78]

No need to. We are doing it anyway.

Your NSA.

GKrellM

[Areyoukiddingme]

You can pry my GKrellM from my cold, dead hands!

Yeah, for 5000 devices, the displays start to take up quite a bit of screen space, but that's what video walls are for!

*cough*

I would like

[Anonymous Coward]

Twitter client, facebook integration, google maps mashup.
And a pony.

Thanks

Re:A more interesting question

[ArsonSmith]

Yea, from scratch, first I'd develop the tools needed to mine the raw materials of silicone, iron, and other needed elements. Then I'd refine them and produce the needed components for memory and processors and storage. as well as develop the new networking, power, form factor etc... Then start working on the boot code and a core kernel, hmm should it be micro/macro or hybrid...? Then I'd start working on interface tools or user space or something along those lines. Once I got this part done I'd start gathering information on what was needed to be monitored. Then develop the required protocols to monitor those things.

On second thought maybe it'd be easier to not start from scratch and build on the tools others have created as a basis and customize from there.

Re:No humans being monitored!

[cenc]

I find a human monitoring system to be the most reliable. There is always someone to fire, if something goes wrong.

Re:Zenoss

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, OpenNMS has a three-digit Slashdot userid, they win!