This week I was happy to see this white paper by Jane Curry a certified Tivoli Consultant and Instructor. Her Open Source Management Options paper compared OpenNMS, Nagios and my favorite network monitoring software, Zenoss Core. Part of the reason I love Zenoss is that I have been involved with the project for over two years and have watched our user community grow (Also and am employed by Zenoss Inc. as their VP of Community and the paycheck helps spread the love;).
The paper is a very thorough comparison of three popular open source monitoring packages. Her analysis was very gratifying since she gave Zenoss the nod. (though to be fair, she didn’t care for OpenNMS’ Java architecture due to personal choice) Otherwise it was a pretty close call:
OpenNMS and Zenoss are both extremely competent products covering automatic discovery, availability monitoring, problem management and performance management and reporting. Zenoss has some topology mapping and has better documentation but the code feels less reliable. OpenNMS currently has a rather messy architecture around events, alarms and notifications, though this is said to be under review. I also struggle to believe that you have to recycle the whole of OpenNMS if you have changed a configuration file!
Also I want to offer my congratulations to the OpenNMS guys for getting praise on their solution they’ve worked hard and have a nice product. It’s also satisfying to see a Tivoli expert acknowledge open source solutions as an alternative to well respected solutions like Tivoli.
As a follow-on John and Coté had Jane as a guest on their podcast to discuss her findings, I highly recommend the IT Management Guys podcast for a good discussion.
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