sad announcement for me and zabbix

[Clansman]

Hi everyone,

I regret to announce that my zabbix installation that monitored about 40 unix servers has been dismantled in favour of nagios due to superior orders. My arguments were not enough... unfortunately, neither were theirs to convince me of the change.

Sad day for me and the zabbix crew.
[]

[abi]

gah, what were the counter arguments?

[Clansman]

as I said, not very convincing:

- nagios is more configurable
- nagios is older and more mature and with commercial support (which we won't use)
- nagios is more flexible with services, hosts and interface settings
- nagios does automatic network mapping (images, diagrams)
- nagios is more stable (??)
- zabbix occupies too much space (the database)

oh well, I'm still using it in my projects and possible future implementations.

[]

[Alexei]

Well, thanks for your story. Take care!

[raminix]

as I said, not very convincing:

- nagios is more configurable
- nagios is older and more mature and with commercial support (which we won't use)
- nagios is more flexible with services, hosts and interface settings
- nagios does automatic network mapping (images, diagrams)
- nagios is more stable (??)
- zabbix occupies too much space (the database)

oh well, I'm still using it in my projects and possible future implementations.

[]

I know what you mean... I came from Nagios as well and it's been an uphill battle, but I've got the folks here sold.

More configurable? Hardly. There are inifnitely more options and capbilities with Zabbix. Plus, editing text based configs are not how I like to spend my day.

Older and more mature? And that counts for what? Commercial support? Did I miss something? I thought the option for paid support is available at hmm... oh yeah! www.zabbix.com!

More flexible? See point #1.

Automatic network mapping? I tried it and it was more like auto-labyrinth generation.

More stable? Why the heck did most of us start looking for alternatives to Nagios in the first place? I can't tell you how many times I've had to restart it due to it crapping out under high load.

Takes more space? You betcha. They have valid point here. How much more data are you collecting with Zabbix vs. Nagios though?


Just smack them about the head a few times until they wise up.

[fmtaylor2]

I feel your pain

But I don't share it. When I got here they had a half implemented nagios setup (still do), and no one was happy with it, it took too much work to setup, required too much "privledged" access to implement, didn't provide pretty pictures and graphs without cacti, which was also half implemented. They also wanted to get away from SNMP due to security concerns, where possible.

I spent a week setting up zabbix to monitor a dozen hosts and draw pretty pictures and as soon as they saw it they were sold. I even told the powers that be that I would need a bigger, faster machine to run the database and they said, "no problem, maybe you can use one of our production database machines, if not we will buy a new one".

What started out as a "look at this. It is good." has turned in to a full blown "must deploy on all platforms." project that keeps me busy most of the day

And hey, if it is good enough for us, it ought to be good enough for you.....

[mgrundy]

How anyone can say Nagios is more configurable is beyond me. It takes so much longer to add a new host and get it all displaying in the right place. Not to mention installing the agent and editing all the check scripts.

When I came to my present job they had a Nagios set up just about completed. I'm now congverting them over to Zabbix with ease. All I had to do was show them the displays and the fact that it displays a history of each check, not just the alarm values.

Even the maps are better. In Nagios you just get the one with everything on it. If you select just a group of servers all is does is show empty space for the others. Doesn't make anything clearer. Zsbbix lets you create as many different maps as you want, each only showing what you need to see.

Give me Zabbix any day!

[Clansman]

How anyone can say Nagios is more configurable is beyond me. It takes so much longer to add a new host and get it all displaying in the right place. Not to mention installing the agent and editing all the check scripts.

I agree. I'm doing nagios now... not because I like or want it...

Cheers,
Pedro Venda.

[den_crane]

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

Present them books: http://www.itil-itsm-world.com/books.htm