Open Source Management Options September 30Th, 2008 Jane Curry Skills 1St Ltd
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Open Source Management Options September 30th, 2008 Jane Curry Skills 1st Ltd www.skills-1st.co.uk Jane Curry Skills 1st Ltd 2 Cedar Chase Taplow Maidenhead SL6 0EU 01628 782565 [email protected] 1 Synopsis Nuts and bolts network and systems management is currently unfashionable. The emphasis is far more on processes that implement service management, driven by methodologies and best practices such as the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). Nonetheless, all service management disciplines ultimately rely on a way to determine some of the following characteristics of systems and networks: ● Configuration management ● Availability management ● Problem management ● Performance management ● Change management ● Security management The commercial marketplace for systems and network management offerings tend to be dominated by the big four ± IBM, HP, CA and BMC. Each have large, modular offerings which tend to be very expensive. Each has grown their portfolio by buying up other companies and then performing some level of integration between their respective branded products. One can argue that the resulting offerings tend to be ªmarketechturesº rather than architectures. This paper looks at Open Source software that addresses the same requirements. Offerings from Netdisco, Cacti and The Dude are examined briefly, followed by an in- depth analysis of Nagios, OpenNMS and Zenoss. This paper is aimed at two audiences. For a discussion on systems management selection processes and an overview of three main open source contenders, read the first few chapters. The last few chapters then provide a product comparison. For those who want lots more detail on Nagios, OpenNMS and Zenoss, the middle sections provide in-depth discussions with plenty of screenshots. 2 Table of Contents 1 Defining ªSystems Managementº....................................................................................5 1.1 Jargon and processes................................................................................................5 1.2 ªSystems Managementº for this paper....................................................................6 2 Systems management tools.............................................................................................6 2.1 Choosing systems management tools......................................................................7 2.2 The advantages of Open Source...............................................................................8 3 Open Source management offerings...............................................................................8 4 Criteria for Open Source management tool selection.................................................10 4.1 General requirements.............................................................................................10 4.1.1 Mandatory Requirements...............................................................................10 4.1.2 Desirable Requirements..................................................................................10 4.2 Defining network and systems ªmanagementº.....................................................11 4.2.1 Network management.....................................................................................11 4.2.2 Systems management......................................................................................12 4.3 What is out-of-scope?..............................................................................................13 5 A quick look at Cacti, The Dude and netdisco..............................................................14 5.1 Cacti.........................................................................................................................14 5.2 netdisco....................................................................................................................17 5.3 The Dude..................................................................................................................20 6 Nagios..............................................................................................................................21 6.1 Configuration ± Discovery and topology................................................................22 6.2 Availability monitoring...........................................................................................27 6.3 Problem management.............................................................................................32 6.3.1 Event console....................................................................................................33 6.3.2 Internally generated events............................................................................37 6.3.3 SNMP TRAP reception and configuration.....................................................39 6.3.4 Nagios notifications ........................................................................................39 6.3.5 Automatic responses to events ± event handlers..........................................41 6.4 Performance management......................................................................................42 6.5 Nagios summary.....................................................................................................45 7 OpenNMS........................................................................................................................46 7.1 Configuration ± Discovery and topology................................................................47 7.1.1 Interface discovery...........................................................................................47 7.1.2 Service discovery..............................................................................................48 7.1.3 Topology mapping and displays......................................................................51 7.2 Availability monitoring...........................................................................................53 7.3 Problem management.............................................................................................59 7.3.1 Event console....................................................................................................59 7.3.2 Internally generated events............................................................................62 7.3.3 SNMP TRAP reception and configuration.....................................................65 7.3.4 Alarms, notifications and automations..........................................................69 3 7.4 Performance management......................................................................................76 7.4.1 Defining data collections.................................................................................76 7.4.2 Displaying performance data..........................................................................85 7.4.3 Thresholding....................................................................................................91 7.5 Managing OpenNMS..............................................................................................97 7.6 OpenNMS summary...............................................................................................98 8 Zenoss..............................................................................................................................98 8.1 Configuration ± Discovery and topology..............................................................100 8.1.1 Zenoss discovery.............................................................................................100 8.1.2 Zenoss topology maps....................................................................................107 8.2 Availability monitoring........................................................................................108 8.2.1 Basic reachability availability......................................................................108 8.2.2 Availability monitoring of services - TCP / UDP ports and windows services ...................................................................................................................................110 8.2.3 Process availability monitoring....................................................................113 8.2.4 Running commands on devices.....................................................................120 8.3 Problem management...........................................................................................121 8.3.1 Event console.................................................................................................122 8.3.2 Internally generated events..........................................................................123 8.3.3 SNMP TRAP reception and configuration...................................................125 8.3.4 email / pager alerting....................................................................................126 8.3.5 Event automations.........................................................................................131 8.4 Performance management....................................................................................132 8.4.1 Defining data collection, thresholding and graphs.....................................132 8.4.2 Displaying performance data graphs...........................................................138 8.5 Zenoss summary....................................................................................................141 9 Comparison of Nagios, OpenNMS and Zenoss...........................................................142