System Monitoring: A Play in 5 Acts 2010-11-14
Act 1: Munin
Munin is dead simple to configure and deploy, and has a very simple, modular sensor API. It uses a collection agent so it can easily monitor values not readable over the network (which is a hard requirement for me). Beyond that it is really just a small wrapper over RRDTool. Its graph UI is painfully simple and it has only the simplest of alerting systems.
Act 2: Munin and Nagios
Nagios is the gold standard when it comes to FOSS network monitoring. It is primarily aimed at alerting on failures, so Munin is still needed for logging time sequence data like performance metrics. This provides more reliable reporting, but it comes with several downsides. One option is to simply duplicate any required sensors between Munin and Nagios. Another is to use the Munin data to trigger alerts in Nagios. This prevents the duplication, but you are still stuck with Munin’s UI for graphing.
Act 3: Nagiosgraph
There are several addons for Nagios that add time-sequence logging, Nagiosgraph and PNP being the most popular. These do require special support from the sensor scripts, but most common plugins will generate the needed output. This does provide a much nicer interface, but it does mean you lose the simplicity of Munin.
Act 4: Zabbix
Zabbix is a young upstart in the monitoring field. It shows a lot of promise as a potential replacement for Nagios, with much simpler configuration and UI. The downside is it doesn’t seem to have any support for logging performance data, so it is a non-starter for now.
Act 5: Opsview
Opsview is built on top of Nagios and Nagiosgraph. It provides some minor UI enhancements as well as some major performance fixes (which I am unlikely to ever notice with ~10 machines to monitor). It also provides somewhat simplified configuration, though the full power of Nagios is available if you dig in to the system.
Conclusion
Opsview seems to be no worse than vanilla Nagios, and it does provide a slightly nicer base to build from. Overall this does feel like picking the lesser of several evils though. The only well-known entry in the Python world is Zenoss, which has minimal remote monitoring capabilities and seems to be even more complex and convoluted than Nagios. Munin 2.0 does show some promise as a future option, but for now Opsview looks like the way to go.