Nagios provides monitoring of all mission-critical infrastructure components. Multiple APIs and community-build add-ons enable integration and monitoring with in-house and third-party applications for optimized scaling.
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Symantec Server Management Suite
Score 7.0 out of 10
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The Symantec Server Management Suite is an option for automating the management of servers and deployments.
Nagios is simply a very configurable and rock solid monitoring engine. For these reasons I would recommend it to any IT professional in any medium to large organization where creating custom checks and programming ones custom needs into the configuration is practical. I would be more hesitant to recommend it as a first monitoring solution for a small business which is usually accompanied by a less experienced and/or more time constrained admin.
It's built by engineers for engineers so setting it up and configuring it is relatively complicated. It could really use a simplified configuration approach, or a GUI to set it up instead of editing config files.
I'd like to see the option to have service notification settings inherited from the host setting notifications. They have to be set up separately but they are often the same, so it would be nice to have less redundancy.
The SMP solution is a beast. Each piece is complicated in itself let alone how everything ties together!
There is plenty of documentation online on how to perform a specific task, but you need to pay attention to what VERSION the article is written for. I've been halfway through implementing something only to hit a roadblock since I'm running a newer version and the option the article says to click on doesn't exist anymore...
We're currently looking to combine a bunch of our network montioring solutions into a single platform. Running multiple unique solutions for monitoring, data collection, compliance reporting etc has become a lot to manage.
The Nagios UI is in need of a complete overhaul. Nice graphics and trendy fonts are easy on the eyes, but the menu system is dated, the lack of built in graphing support is confusing, and the learning curve for a new user is too steep.
I haven't had to use support very often, but when I have, it has been effective in helping to accomplish our goals. Since Nagios has been very popular for a long time, there is also a very large user base from which to learn from and help you get your questions answered.
We have tested several other monitoring products which were able to monitor the basic matrix (Memory, DiskUsage, CPU%, UpTime, Running Service Status, Port 80 Up/Down). Although some offered far better UIs, they lacked the ability to monitor ANYTHING. Zabbix, being the only contender worthy of competing, is a good alternative to Nagios. We also tried Zenoss Core & OpenNMS which were good enough for non-Linux engineers to get started with. OP5 was another service-oriented monitoring solution we evaluated. Apart from Nagios, Consul is heavily used to monitor & register the micro-service systems & end-point URLs. Due to the time invested (9+years) in Nagios, we were able to get more components installed/configured easily than alternatives.
I have had exposure to SCCM before we moved to Altiris (aka SMP) and SMP does some things in a more complicated way, but there is a LOT of flexibility too. For example, with Patch Management, it's very similar to SCCM, you download the patches you want to install and then publish them. However, with SCCM, you need to have WSUS running on the back end to handle the patch deployment, while SMP does the installs itself. It syncs the patches with the agents and stages the files, and will install them when the maintenance window opens.
With it being a free tool, there is no cost associated with it, so it's very valuable to an organization to get something that is so great and widely used for free.
You can set up as many alerts as you want without incurring any fees.
Being able to report on the majority of things you want all from one interface, makes it really easy to get the results you want.
Because my employer didn't provide training, it took working with support, reading technical documentation, and just playing around on my own to learn how to do certain things.
I've had a lot of help from the SMP Support staff and they're great people and very helpful!
