RAID monitoring

[J. Epperson]

On Sat, November 3, 2007 12:20, Marcus Bointon wrote:
> On 2 Nov 2007, at 21:22, Mike Hanby wrote:
>
>> I use Nagios.
>
>
> I don't know about anyone else, but I find nagios incredibly difficult
> and unpleasant to use. Trivial tasks like adding a node seem massively
> overcomplicated, and its policy of "do nothing out of the box" is
> really unhelpful. I once spent 4 days trying to get it to monitor 4
> nodes and send email on errors and eventually had to give up and write
> my own in about 10 mins that monitored the same stuff and sent email
> and SMS. Even when I've used working nagios setups, the displays are
> not terribly helpful, well designed or informative. Though it doesn't
> solve quite the same problem, I've found munin really good at 'just
> working' and it's really trivial to write new plugins for. I keep
> hearing about people using nagios on big installations - I figure they
> must be complete geniuses or just have lots of spare time...
>
Agreed on Nagios.  I figure the big installations have a full-time Nagios
wizard who does r&d and rollout all day.

Hobbit, the open source successor to the original Big Brother, on
steroids, is my current choice.  Easy to set up, easy to write custom ext
scripts for because it's so well documented, and uses RRD so the data is
extremely extensible.  You can get graphs of how often the CEO logs in if
you wanna.  And the mailing list is very active, great peer support.  Some
folks have farms in the thousands being monitored.

regards,
j.