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The "main problem" with nagios is that it's configuration is godawful. The "main problem" with most nagios users is that they edit their configuration manually.

The "main problem" with nagios is that it's configuration is godawful. The "main problem" with most nagios users is that they edit their configuration manually. Automate that shit. We use Nagios to monitor our infra (5000+ checks, hundreds of hosts), and chef maintains the config. Works without a hitch - and best of all - it's been running for years, and not once has anyone had to poke it with a stick. Yes, NetSaint is old, yes, the UI is worse to look at than Putin's crotch, yes, the plugin architecture is whimsical as all shit - but... IT WORKS AND YOU CAN RELY ON IT.

roeme 13y ago
^ This. I really don't understand how people claim that nagios can't scale.
- dbenhur 13y ago
  5000 checks and a few hundred hosts is a fairly tiny operation. At an order of magnitude above that you will start feeling real pain with Nagios.
  - madaxe_again 13y ago
    Yup, never claimed anything but - but it's big enough that automation is essential, lest you descend into some variety of lovecraftian horror-scape.
- k3oni 13y ago
  It can't scale when we are talking 10000's of checks, triggers and hosts. This is why we moved to Zabbix: Number of items monitored: 77342 Number of triggers enabled: 25405 Try and scale Nagios to those values and let me know how it works. We tried and we let it go a few years ago.
mcguire 13y ago
Once upon a time, back when I first installed NetSaint, the configuration was so bad that I learned OCaml to write a preprocessor to generate its configuration.[1] Nagios is the improvement! And yeah, it's horrible. [1] http://www.crsr.net/Software/nscc.html http://www.crsr.net/Software/nscc.html
vacri 13y ago
This is one of the weird things about puppet. The core of puppet has general types, and software-specific stuff is in modules... except for Nagios rules, which are core types. Struck me as odd that only Nagios gets this 'star' treatment in the core. http://docs.puppetlabs.com/references/latest/type.html http://docs.puppetlabs.com/references/latest/type.html
- barrkel 13y ago
  Puppet is almost entirely composed from weird things, so much so that I'm surprised you're surprised. rspec-puppet in particular; so much pain.
- stonith 13y ago
  Another interesting example is that yumrepo is a core type, but apt::source has to be managed via a module
oblio 13y ago
Is the configuration dynamic? Like EC2 autoscaling or something? As far as I know Nagios needs a restart for each configuration change - imagine doing tens of Nagios restarts daily...

roeme 13y ago

^ This. I really don't understand how people claim that nagios can't scale.

dbenhur 13y ago
5000 checks and a few hundred hosts is a fairly tiny operation. At an order of magnitude above that you will start feeling real pain with Nagios.
- madaxe_again 13y ago
  Yup, never claimed anything but - but it's big enough that automation is essential, lest you descend into some variety of lovecraftian horror-scape.
k3oni 13y ago
It can't scale when we are talking 10000's of checks, triggers and hosts. This is why we moved to Zabbix: Number of items monitored: 77342 Number of triggers enabled: 25405 Try and scale Nagios to those values and let me know how it works. We tried and we let it go a few years ago.

mcguire 13y ago

Once upon a time, back when I first installed NetSaint, the configuration was so bad that I learned OCaml to write a preprocessor to generate its configuration.[1] Nagios is the improvement! And yeah, it's horrible. [1] http://www.crsr.net/Software/nscc.html http://www.crsr.net/Software/nscc.html

vacri 13y ago

This is one of the weird things about puppet. The core of puppet has general types, and software-specific stuff is in modules... except for Nagios rules, which are core types. Struck me as odd that only Nagios gets this 'star' treatment in the core. http://docs.puppetlabs.com/references/latest/type.html http://docs.puppetlabs.com/references/latest/type.html

barrkel 13y ago
Puppet is almost entirely composed from weird things, so much so that I'm surprised you're surprised. rspec-puppet in particular; so much pain.
stonith 13y ago
Another interesting example is that yumrepo is a core type, but apt::source has to be managed via a module

oblio 13y ago

Is the configuration dynamic? Like EC2 autoscaling or something? As far as I know Nagios needs a restart for each configuration change - imagine doing tens of Nagios restarts daily...