Re: netsaint vs HPOV

On Thu, 8 Apr 2004, Bong Barnido wrote:

> I am planning to present this cool monitoring tool but
> I need some info from you guys. Who has a complete
> comparison between netsaint and NNM HP OpenView?

Bong (interesting name),

Since most everyone has migrated to Nagios and there isn't much netsaint
list traffic, I'll answer your question.

The last company I worked for sent 2 employees to HPOV training conference
and was pretty confident it could answer all of their monitoring needs.
While the network group worked on getting HPOV setup the systems group
setup netsaint as a monitoring tool for our servers/services. It took less
than a week to setup all of our almost 150 servers in netsaint and fine
tune it to page us on only real problems.

6 months later they beta tested HPOVs setup and to my knowledge they still
don't trust it completely to be as accurate as (now) Nagios. I was
responsible for setting up the server that would host the HPOV NMS
software. I didn't have any part in setting up the monitoring on it. I
took over the Netsaint setup at my last company when the guy who set it
up was let go and also migrated them to Nagios. I did the same at my
current company.

Here's what I can tell you specifically about the 2.

As I understood it or as it was deployed at my last company HPOV has all
kinds of modules built around SNMP. If you can get a MIB/OID for it, HPOV
can monitor it. HPOV claims better scalability. I know nothing to comment
to that claim. HPOV had a limited number of operating systems that it
would run on which forced us to deploy another Solaris machine and it had
a few vulnerabilities that came out for it when I was working with it.
Upgrading to a major revision change was not pretty either. (I vaguely
remember the numbers version 5 to 6 but I could be wrong.) In comparison
the netsaint to Nagios upgrade was a breeze with the netsaint2nagios
tool. I wouldn't setup the config files the way the migration script
does in a new installation, but it made migrating less of a pain.

Nagios has compiled "plug-ins" that are not all build around SNMP as well
as a check_snmp plug-in (That in reality makes it an "HPOV + more" on
features). Nagios (since netsaint development has stopped and
nagios is what you should be running) is designed from the ground up to be
a watch and notify system. I have seen netsaint and nagios both keep pace
with the HPOV system and still have better accuracy and tune-ability. It's
easier to set up and maintain. I've run nagios at 2 installations and been
really happy with the performance and accuracy. I think "scalability" is a
scare term some people use to classify the unknown to strike fear in the
hearts of managers.

Nagios is more practical but that may be a bad thing to some people. It
actually connects to port 80 on your web server to make sure it is passing
out a web page instead of checking that the port 80 socket is open and
that the apache process is running (which is what HPOV had the capability
to do). Neither of which mean that you are up and running they way you
want to be. Same for the other services in the built in commands
check_smtp, check_nntp, check_ping. Real world tests. The down side to
that is some people don't like to have real world probes messing with
statistics even if it is incredibly small traffic.

Writing a nagios plug-in can be as simple as a shell script or a perl
script. Adding to HPOV was learning SNMP traps and setting one up. (Did
they ever make an easy how-to for that that didn't sound like studying
Greek?)

Someone please speak up if you know more about HPOV current than what I
put there. That's been over 2 years since I've seen HPOV deployed.

Did I mention price?

Hope that helps,

Gerald


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