On Sat, Jul 22, 2006 at 12:16:28PM -0400, Gary T. Giesen wrote:

I'm looking at depolying an open source-based NMS solution, and I'm

Define what you want in your "NMS" -- not even the vendors can manage to agree on a meaning.

looking at a couple products, mostly OpenNMS (http://www.opennms.org)

"What is OpenNMS" makes it sound like Nagios and nothing more. They also insist on mentioning "enterprise-grade" and "open source" before listing features, which suggests their priorities might be a bit bass-ackwards.

and Zenoss (http://www.zenoss.org). I like the looks of Zenoss, but

It's written in Zope, and depends on half the Python world besides. I have a severe allergic reaction to anything involving Zope, since it's a mammoth pile of incomprehensible Python that only seems to produce shite that nobody wants to maintain (cf. Plone -- offlist if you want the full story on that).

Even better would be someone who's used both products and could give me a quick comparison. I'd also welcome suggestions of another product (as long as it's not bb, nagios, or hobbit) that I should be looking at.

Honestly, I find it hard to go past the combination of Nagios and Cacti. Perhaps that's just familiarity blinding me to the worst excesses of Nagios, (although I can give you the hit list of what's horribly wrong with it) normally by the time I've worked around the warts of whatever's being pushed as an alternative, it would have been less effort just to stick with what I know and tolerate. If you can identify what it is you can't stand about Nagios, and what features, exactly, you're looking for in your "NMS", somebody can no doubt point you in the direction of your perfect dream-tool. - Matt -- And Jesus said unto them, "And whom do you say that I am?" They replied, "You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground of our being, the ontological foundation of the context of our very selfhood revealed." And Jesus replied, "What?" -- Seen on the 'net