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

Bash monitoring

[Foofoobar]

I built a smal program to updating all bash profiles with timestamps, compare changes every few ticks and save changes to a database where the users were given unique ID and it would associated a parent child relationship when users su/sudo to show heightened privileges. Very useful as sys admins are known to wipe their bash historys and this kept a centralized history with relationships.