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Anyone using or aware of a good alternative to either Nagios or WhatsUp Gold?

It would have to monitor windows servers/desktops, Linux servers would be a big plus, but don’t have a use for it right away. It’s for a work environment, less than 30 servers. Alerts with text paging would be a must.

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Perhaps you can tell us why you don't like Nagios, so that we have some sort of idea of what you do want. – John Gardeniers Feb 16 '10 at 9:58
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migrated from superuser.com Feb 16 '10 at 8:37

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8 Answers

up vote 2 down vote

I was also looking for an alternative to Nagios and came across ZABBIX. It's been an absolute gem. The Linux agent installs on the servers without any dependencies.

  • You can use active (same as Nagios' NCSA) or passive (same as Nagios' NRPE) check executions.
  • No need to install plugins in addition to the agent.
  • You get graphing straight out of the box.
  • You can create your own dashboards (screens) and graphs.
  • You get uptime reports/service SLA calculations out of the box.
  • It runs on PHP with a back-end database and you can split out the monitoring servers from the web front-end servers.
  • You can do distributed monitoring (not high-availability, though) so you could install a proxy at a site (your own or clients) and monitor it through your central server.
  • You can execute custom scripts (e.g. for SMS) for alerting
  • It does have a native Windows agent
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up vote 1 down vote

Depends on what you call 'good'. Are you looking for enterprise class solutions or home networks ones? Are you looking for free or pay applications? What OS are you running it under, etc...

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Also would be helpful knowing why you don't want Nagios or Whats Up Gold. – Kevin M Feb 12 '10 at 14:51
It would have to monitor windows servers /desktops, Linux servers would be a big plus. But don’t have a use for it right away . It’s for a work environment, less than 30 servers. Alerts with text paging would be a must. – Boxdog Feb 12 '10 at 15:26
Any product with email alert can just be used to send emails to a SMS gateway that will then text page you, you won't find that builtin since you need the interface to the GSM world anyway. – Alexandre Nizoux Feb 12 '10 at 15:47
Please, make sure you understand the implications of relying of a SMTP-to-SMS gateway for alert management. It won't help you much the day your firewall dies in a horrible fire (or when joe digger is making a new sewer on the outside). Nagios has support for a GSM-SMS adapter, consider it! – pauska Feb 16 '10 at 10:29
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up vote 1 down vote

If you're looking for SMS or phone call alerts when something goes wrong, check out a product I've been working on, PagerDuty.com. It connects with many monitoring systems (Nagios, Zenoss, Pingdom, and many others) and alerts via phone or SMS. It also handles escalation and scheduling of your on-call.

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up vote 0 down vote

We're in the process of migrating our Nagios install to Opsera's OpsView. Similar to Nagios, but with a much easier interface, plus it can use many of the same plug-ins and code that Nagios uses. So far seems to be working great. And to send an SMS, just find the email address for that phone number. Google will help with that, but it could be something like. 12345678@sms.serviceprovider.com

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up vote 0 down vote

try opmanager with sms plugin. you can plugin a either a gsm phone or a low cost modem and start sending sms alerts directly without using email. comes in handy when your mail server is down (email based sms wont work in that case !!)

http://www.manageengine.com/products/opmanager/sms-plugin.html

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up vote 0 down vote

Have a look at MikroTik's The Dude. It's free, quite full featured and the latest version (3.5) looks to be quite an improvement over the 2.x versions. You cna let it be as simple as you want, or it can grow with you.

Furthermore, for a less-than-100-device implementation, GroundWork OpenSource offers a "Enterprise Edition Quickstart" service that includes their whole GroundWork Enterprise product (which roxors) for only $49USD per year ($59USD per year for the OpenSUSE Virtual Appliance). Interestingly enough, one of the $49USD per year options is to have it hosted in the Amazon cloud.

IMO, the GroundWork implementation would be best just because of the massive amount of features offered and the ease of dropping in a virtual appliance. YMMV.

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I've been using GroundWork Open Source Community Edition for ages, and it works quite well. However, they recently closed their support forum, rather than fixing the spam problem. Without a functional official support forum for the product, it seems a bit dead in the water. It does provide a great interface for configuring Nagios. – dunxd Feb 3 '11 at 13:32
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up vote 0 down vote

I suggest you should try Verax NMS. SMS alerting is available. You can monitor both Windows / Linux servers and a range of applications (incl. databases, http servers, etc.).

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up vote 0 down vote

Shinken may be what you are looking for.

  • Windows and Linux native monitoring.
  • 100% python and open source.
  • Focuses on business impacts in addition to service states
  • Good correlation and fast state resolution (triggered dependancy verifications).
  • Low false positives. Which is the point!
  • Full featured yet very powerful. It is the Nagios replacement while still being compatible.

It is the core, then you choose your frontend (Multisite, Thruk, GLPI, Centreon, etc.)

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