Let's not take things to extremes, and don't take my comment out of context, as you both have.
Nagios is complicated compared to many other products. The simple fact that some rather large books are available points to that fact. But as others have pointed out, it doesn't have to be that way, and as Hyperic shows. If you have two tools that have the same features, but one takes a month to install and the other a week, which do you choose? I don't shy away from a process simply because of complexity, but needless complexity is just a waste of my time. I have a lot more things to do than I will ever have time for, and most sys admins for SMB's would agree (not that large company admins don't, but they tend to have a lot more resources availablle to them.)
So now if anybody wants to get personal, come on over and we can match skills. Otherwise drop the flamebait and keep on topic.
We've been running Hyperic (both free and enterprise versions) for quite a few months now, both in-house and at client sites all across the US. We monitor everything from a single, stand-alone Apache server on Linux, to a multi-site network running custom apps/Tomcat/Apache/Oracle/MySQL on Linux/HP-UX/Windows, multiple firewalls, routers and switches.
We've used Nagios. We've used Zabbix. We've used OpenView. We've used Cacti(different class, I know). We've tried countless other monitoring tools/solutions. We USE Hyperic.
Features, to me, are meaningless if it takes a PhD to build/configure/maintain them. One of Hyperic's strengths is it's ease of installation and auto-discovery. You literally CAN be up and running in under 30 min...UNDER. The variety of metrics that are available is almost overwhelming if you dig into it, and the power and flexibility of the plugins is dizzying. And as you learn the product you can tighten your install, tweak things, and make them exactly as you want. The inline and online help is very good, and improving constantly. Is it perfect? No, nothing is, but Hyperic is constantly making improvements and additions. The developers are active in the user community, answering questions, taking suggestions, and, I feel, genuinely listening to their users. I've been involved with too many open-source companies that go commercial that become downright abusive of their users and their questions.
Personally, I would hate to work for anybody with such a strong prejudice, so don't look for my resume anytime soon. Yes, some Java code can have issues when people take short-cuts or just write sloppy, improper code, but Hyperic's memory use and CPU utilization are minimal compared to everything else running on these systems.
Folks, give Hyperic a try. I guarantee you'll get a better feel for this product with, say, 1 hour of investment than you will with a week's worth in most others.
Let's deslant this liberal addition. Nike-Ajax (Nike-Hercules, et al) were purely DEFENSIVE, anti-aircraft systems, and were mostly non-nuclear tipped, especially later deployments as use of nuclear warheads for antiaircraft purposes was discouraged. As for being 'hidden,' well, only if you call hiding in plain sight hidden. Their locations were both very easily located and observable. Their placement close to urban/metropolitan areas was a necessity given their primary role: air defense.
Hiding chemical production plants in downtown hospitals is a far cry from this. I hate liberal hate-spewing.
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Let's not take things to extremes, and don't take my comment out of context, as you both have.
Nagios is complicated compared to many other products. The simple fact that some rather large books are available points to that fact. But as others have pointed out, it doesn't have to be that way, and as Hyperic shows. If you have two tools that have the same features, but one takes a month to install and the other a week, which do you choose? I don't shy away from a process simply because of complexity, but needless complexity is just a waste of my time. I have a lot more things to do than I will ever have time for, and most sys admins for SMB's would agree (not that large company admins don't, but they tend to have a lot more resources availablle to them.)
So now if anybody wants to get personal, come on over and we can match skills. Otherwise drop the flamebait and keep on topic.
We've been running Hyperic (both free and enterprise versions) for quite a few months now, both in-house and at client sites all across the US. We monitor everything from a single, stand-alone Apache server on Linux, to a multi-site network running custom apps/Tomcat/Apache/Oracle/MySQL on Linux/HP-UX/Windows, multiple firewalls, routers and switches.
We've used Nagios. We've used Zabbix. We've used OpenView. We've used Cacti(different class, I know). We've tried countless other monitoring tools/solutions. We USE Hyperic.
Features, to me, are meaningless if it takes a PhD to build/configure/maintain them. One of Hyperic's strengths is it's ease of installation and auto-discovery. You literally CAN be up and running in under 30 min...UNDER. The variety of metrics that are available is almost overwhelming if you dig into it, and the power and flexibility of the plugins is dizzying. And as you learn the product you can tighten your install, tweak things, and make them exactly as you want. The inline and online help is very good, and improving constantly. Is it perfect? No, nothing is, but Hyperic is constantly making improvements and additions. The developers are active in the user community, answering questions, taking suggestions, and, I feel, genuinely listening to their users. I've been involved with too many open-source companies that go commercial that become downright abusive of their users and their questions.
Personally, I would hate to work for anybody with such a strong prejudice, so don't look for my resume anytime soon. Yes, some Java code can have issues when people take short-cuts or just write sloppy, improper code, but Hyperic's memory use and CPU utilization are minimal compared to everything else running on these systems.
Folks, give Hyperic a try. I guarantee you'll get a better feel for this product with, say, 1 hour of investment than you will with a week's worth in most others.
Let's deslant this liberal addition. Nike-Ajax (Nike-Hercules, et al) were purely DEFENSIVE, anti-aircraft systems, and were mostly non-nuclear tipped, especially later deployments as use of nuclear warheads for antiaircraft purposes was discouraged. As for being 'hidden,' well, only if you call hiding in plain sight hidden. Their locations were both very easily located and observable. Their placement close to urban/metropolitan areas was a necessity given their primary role: air defense.
Hiding chemical production plants in downtown hospitals is a far cry from this. I hate liberal hate-spewing.