[olug] System monitoring

[Sean Kelly]

On Wed, Sep 06, 2006 at 11:21:27AM -0500, Adam Haeder wrote:
> I knew everyone would start pitching nagios because it's the latest and
> greatest, but don't knock Big Brother just because it's old. Especially in
> your case, where you want to monitor windows, linux, mac and netware, it
> can handle all. It's client/server based, so it does service polling (port
> scans, etc) from the server, but also aggregates client data through a
> service running on each client. I've used it since '99 with great success,
> even written a few plugins for it. I can even help you set it up, Craig :)

'Those kids these days with their newfangled alert monitoring solutions and
mail programs! My Big Brother and Pine work just fine, dang nabbit!"

But seriously, Big Brother is pretty primitive. Try something new. Yes the
newer ones are a total pain to configure, but they offer so much more
flexibility and a wider feature set. Even the interface is pretty minimal
last I looked at it. I especially like the demo they have up and link to
on their site:

http://bb4.com/bb/

     The page cannot be found

     The page you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed,
     or is temporarily unavailable.

Classy.

I've actually seen Quest try to pitch their commercial solutions. We recently
went though all the various commercial offerings' presentations, and they
were one of them. It was pretty amusing. We weren't very impressed. They by
far weren't the worst when it came to prseenting, but their products were
pretty lacking and seemingly haphazard.

-- 
Sean Kelly          | PGP KeyID: D2E5E296
smkelly at smkelly.org | http://www.smkelly.org