[Techtalk] Experiences with Nagios and/or Advanced Host Monitor?

[Meryll Larkin]

Hey Tracey,

I have experience with both Nagios and Monitor interdependently.

I did not set up Nagios nor Monitor but I inherited them.  I found them to
be useful but cumbersome and not intuitive.  There are places to make
changes in configuration that are the wrong places and won't make changes.
There are places to make changes in configuration that are the right places
but the changes won't take until you have gone to a different tab to "write"
the changes into the system.

The problem was that the person who set up Nagios was gone, I was given no
documentation, the documentation I had wasn't very helpful to me and the
rest of my team was unhelpful because they wanted to change all the servers
from Linux to Windows anyway and they blocked me from "wasting time" on a
system they were planning to retire.

However, what Nagios did:  send out alerts to our email, pagers, or cell
phones when a system was in trouble was very helpful.

Summary:  not an easy system to learn or administer - not because it is
terribly difficult but because the interface is non-intuitive.  But useful.


Meryll