Seeking advice

[Landstalker]

Hello everyone, first time poster here


Not sure how many people here have been looking at depth into monitoring and graphing solutions but I have and I had come to the conclusion that Cacti and Nagios were the ways to go. Then my colloegue did some searching on freshmeat and came up with Zbbix. And I must say, at the moment its looks very nice, I've installed a demo of it on my machine here that is running cacti and although its not configured yet the interface etc is very very nice.

Now, I'm asking all the people who have ever looked at other solutions who are using Zabbix, is it a worthy replacement of Nagios and Cacti?

What the solution needs to do is show you performance data in the form of graphs that are presentable to customers (even if I need to manually copy and paste them into something like powerpoint, ick) and the ability to warn people that a servers/services have gone down.

Nagios had the ability to warn via pager (although I was yet to seriously look into that).

Another thing, is there an upto date manual in pdf form? I find it difficult to read html manuals.

Other then that, great work to the Zabbix team, they seem to know what they are talking about.

[James Wells]

Greetings,

Now, I'm asking all the people who have ever looked at other solutions who are using Zabbix, is it a worthy replacement of Nagios and Cacti?

This is somewhat of a trick question. Nagios, by default, is a point in time style monitoring system, as such, you are unable to get a true history of items without the use of third party utilities. Cacti is simply a frontend for RRD Tool. Because of this, you are effectively required to use three completely dissimilar products to achieve historical monitoring. Zabbix is a historical monitor with point in time capabilities.

What the solution needs to do is show you performance data in the form of graphs that are presentable to customers (even if I need to manually copy and paste them into something like powerpoint, ick) and the ability to warn people that a servers/services have gone down.

While Zabbix does not generate non-HTML reports at present, there is a tool in the cookbook section of the forums that allows for the creation of PDF based reports on the server group level.

]QUOTE]Nagios had the ability to warn via pager (although I was yet to seriously look into that).[/QUOTE]
Zabbix is capable of nitification via email or script. The email is small enough it can be sent via SMS or SMTP, and the scripting interface can be made to send any type of data, depending on your needs.

Another thing, is there an upto date manual in pdf form? I find it difficult to read html manuals.

At present, no. Alexei does try to keepd the documents up to date, but there have been quite a few major feature changes / additions of late that are not yet refleced in the documentation.

As for the PDF vs HTML piece. The 1.0 documents are in HTML and PDF. The PDF version contains a great deal more information than the HOTML version, however, at present the 1.1 documentation is not available in PDF.

[bbrendon]

Now, I'm asking all the people who have ever looked at other solutions who are using Zabbix, is it a worthy replacement of Nagios and Cacti?

I actually use Cacti and Zabbix. You can't really beat Cacti's SNMP capabilities and slick interface with anything I have ever seen.

I would also say it depends on your requirements and your enviornment. For me, I use Zabbix more than cacti because of the active agents and the fact that I mostly monitor servers. It is very nice not having to poll and punch holes in firewalls when I can throw an active zabbix agent and get nice monitoring stats quickly.

If I was in a situation where I didn't need notifications and all that was needed was historical information on network devices, I would probably use cacti. That really its sweet spot.

Hopefully someday Zabbix with have the SNMP capabilites of Cacti.

[Landstalker]

Ok, so the concensus is that Zabbix is more of a replacement to Nagios with a few extra features of Cacti but its not an all out graphing solution.

There doesn't seem to be anything out there on the market that encompasses these items. I'll have to bring one out

[bbrendon]

The ultimate solution would really be to integrate zabbix and cacti. Unfortunately they use different backends, but the front end on both of them are PHP.

I'm not sure if I would start from scratch, but by all means, contribute code to these projects!