[opennms-discuss] Comparison between OpenNMS and Nagios

[Paul Wilson]

Hello list

People in our office are interested in deploying an NMS package for some
Canada-specific functions. The advice given them from a good outside
consultant was to go with Nagios, while I've been impressed over the last
1-2 years with the support provided for ONMS. I'm not at all familiar
with Nagios, but I've seen some people post to this and the Install list
mentioning that they've been using Nagios and may move to ONMS.

Does anyone know of a good, fair comparison between the two packages? I'd
like to have something to share with the team that will implement it.

Thanks,
Paul

Paul R. Wilson : [phone] voice : [phone] fax
***@ca.mci.com ===== www.mci.com/ca ===== MCI Canada

One Idea, One Network, One Company - MCI

[Tarus Balog]

Post by Paul Wilson
Does anyone know of a good, fair comparison between the two
packages? I'd
like to have something to share with the team that will implement it.

We get this question a lot, and I think the community will be able to
present a less biased view than I have. After all, OpenNMS has been
pretty much my life for four years. (grin)

My views are listed in the FAQ:

http://tinyurl.com/aq4e6

But I can restate them here.

For many, Nagios seems easier to learn and it seems to have more
features than OpenNMS. I believe that it is easy to add new pollers,
and I also believe there is a map of some sort.

The downside is that it is apparently even harder to configure than
OpenNMS, although a commercial company (similar to The OpenNMS Group
that supports OpenNMS) has recently open sourced a configuration tool.

Also, there is the scalability issue. We have two clients who
migrated to OpenNMS from Nagios once they hit about 1000 nodes.

We compete the Nagios, but they are not our enemy. I've even
exchanged a couple of e-mails with Ethan - really nice guy. In my
mind, they make us work to become better. We will even have support
for the Nagios Remote Plug-ins Executor (NRPE) in 1.3 (to be
demonstrated at LinuxWorld Expo in August).

In the end - use what works for you. Our focus is really on the
enterprise, and perhaps even carrier class networks through OpenOSS
(http://www.opennms.org/blogs/view_post.php?post_id=7), although we
love our users in the small to medium size organizations as well.

-T

-----

Tarus Balog
The OpenNMS Group, Inc.
Main : [phone] Fax: [phone]
Direct: [phone] Skype: tarusb
Key Fingerprint: 8945 8521 9771 FEC9 5481 512B FECA 11D2 FD82 B45C

[Matthew D Kelly]

Paul,

We recently evaluated both nagios and here are some of the things we
found. This is by no way comprehensive, its just some of the things I
remember from our evaluation. We installed and ran both nagios and
opennms and eventually chose opennms.

Nagios:
The good points:
1. Service dependencies. If your router goes down you only get 1 email
for the router being down.
2. Flexible Plug-in architecture for polling custom services.
3. Simple install
4. Pretty good documentation

The bad points:
1. Difficult to configure. The config files require a lot of time to set
up for each host, and if I remember correctly there is no way to
automatically add hosts, i.e. auto discover an entire subnet.
2. SNMP, it will support SNMP traps, but you will have to use another
program like mrtg to pull any kind of SNMP metrics.

OpenNMS:
The good points:
1. Configuration (Most of the configs can be done from the web
interface)
2. Auto Discovery of Nodes. Makes it easy to add a lot of hosts.
3. SNMP. The configuration for gathering SNMP data and displaying it may
not be the easiest, but it is there.
4. Modern code base

The bad points:
1. Configuration (Not all of the configs can be edited from the web
interface ) :)
2. The documentation. The documentation wasn't the best when I stated w/
OpenNMS, but it is getting better all the time.
3. No service dependencies, If your switch dies you get emails for all
nodes on the switch (I believe this is flagged to be added to a future
release)


I would encourage you to install both packages and see which one more
closely meets your needs.


----
Matthew Kelly
University of Wyoming
Library Systems
[phone]

-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Wilson [mailto:***@ca.mci.com]
Sent: Thursday, July 21, 2005 7:48 AM
To: opennms-***@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: [opennms-discuss] Comparison between OpenNMS and Nagios

Hello list

People in our office are interested in deploying an NMS package for some
Canada-specific functions. The advice given them from a good outside
consultant was to go with Nagios, while I've been impressed over the
last
1-2 years with the support provided for ONMS. I'm not at all familiar
with Nagios, but I've seen some people post to this and the Install list
mentioning that they've been using Nagios and may move to ONMS.

Does anyone know of a good, fair comparison between the two packages?
I'd like to have something to share with the team that will implement
it.

Thanks,
Paul

Paul R. Wilson : [phone] voice : [phone] fax
***@ca.mci.com ===== www.mci.com/ca ===== MCI Canada

One Idea, One Network, One Company - MCI


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