Orion vs Nagios

ok, seems that i would be the first one.

first i must say, that we have both tools running in our company. for my person i prefer solarwinds, 

cause its easier to handle in real a windows environment. and i must say yes, i like unix systems more then windows but in this case i would use cacti instead of nagios.

however, the solwarwinds community is stable and have in most cases good solutions for problems. the solarwinds staff is endeavored to help where they can.

the best for u that u can do, is to test all the software out there and to find your prefernce, in case of installing, handling and look and feel.

yours
otto

I have used both, nagios in a previous position and solarwinds at my current position.  Nagios is great for flexibility of configuration, but that comes at a price.  It is much harder to manage a nagios server than solarwinds, because all of the configuration is done through text files.  Plus management likes to know that anyone who steps into the management can follow instructions, understand a system, and use it as needed. 

 Solarwinds main advantage is simplicity IMO.  It is easy to setup, configure, change.  It also collects performance data easily, which I could not say about nagios.  We used a plugin for performance data called perfparse, but that is a bear to configure.  If you used nagios for alerting/status and then cacti for performance data, you may be on to something.  But then you are managing two totally different systems, under different datastores.  Nagios and cacti work the best if you use the systems to collect the data and create the graphs, but customize the web frontend for your needs.  There are some GUI configuration tools for Nagios, but in my experience you sacrifice the flexibility that makes nagios strong in the first place. 

Hi,

 Thanks for the response, pretty much what I expected:-)

Miron,

The question that needs to be asked is "who is the audience for the tool"?. For example, if a remote site goes down, is your helpdesk expected to first call them and verfiy power and equipment? How about management, will they want to see it?

Solarwinds has by leaps and bounds the best visual interface for seeing network status for most I.T. folks. The helpdesk loves it. The management love it. My boss loves it. Even managers at remote sites love it.

We keep all the real geeky tools under covers - only accessible by the geeks.

As far as HP NMS goes, I've personally seen three HP NMS installations turn into dustpiles after Orion was brought on the scene. Consider this:

• An full-blown installed Orion system is under 50K. Most installed HP NMS installation are 500K
• Sure the HP NMS does more (for the extra 450K it should) but how much of that is useful day-to-day? Worth $450,000.00 ??
  
• You need training to administer an HP NMS - and a lot of time and/or consultants. For Orion you need to read the manual, or there's a short class. - That's 100K per year saved (one body)
• How friendly is the interface? - Orion wins hands down
• How useful is the interface? - Once again , Orion wins hand down
• Risk - HP NMS takes a suitcase of cash to implement. IMHO if you want HP NMS, you should first run Orion for a year, then re-think it.
  

Often it's as easy as this - download the trial and the add-ins. Set it up. Show the WWW interface to your boss, the helpdesk manager, the CIO, and the CFO (if you can). They'll use it, understand it, and ask meaningful questions on the data they see.

My bet is they will not want to see it "go away". 

Don 

I currently have both running in my environment.  Nagios is used for service monitoring pretty much.  There are plug ins that will do syntehtic web transactions, which we have setup.  I mention that because you said you werent sure.  Orion can not do this.

The administrative overhead of nagios is terrible.  I would not implement it unless you were dedicated to just NMS.  You can also check out Zenoss which is another product like nagios.  Its almost like a hybrid of nagios and Cacti, and its all web based (linux). 

In the end, I have never found a product better than Orion in the area that Orion specializes in.  I have been working for over the last year demoing different products and trying to find a product that does application monitoring (SQL, exchange, WMI, services) as well as regular SNMP but none of them stack up to Orion in the SNMP area.  The day that Orion can finally have a WMI/service monitoring package, my search may very well end. 

The day that Orion can finally have a WMI/service monitoring package, my search may very well end.

coming fairly soon...

Ya, I have been keeping up on the posts.  I signed up for the beta list during the summer but never heard anything about it.  Now I am just waiting...

 you will be contacted shortly...

I can tell you that we have found Orion to be one of the best values for the money. What impressed us the most was the fact that once Orion was set up devices put in, it behaved. It does not change settings nor does it try to "redraw" maps based on discovery. We do not enable auto-discovery. We disabled it on a well known Suite of nnm type software and that software would re-enable it without intervention.

 While Orion is not perfect and some of its modules have not matured as yet, it is a good product.

We feel that elegant simplicity is the better way to go. Complex systems tend to require billets that are dedicated to maintenance. Our take on that is it is a waste of talent if the software won't behave or do what we want consistantly.

Just some thoughts and input. I am not trying to trumpet the product or wave a magic wand.

Mark 

Hi,

 thanks to all who have responded and I should have thanked you sooner. I currently run Solarwinds Orion monitoring about a 1000 nodes(network only) - and find it extremely easy to use. In every release I see the product getting better and the guys in solarwinds are doing well. Obviously us customers are always demanding more and trying to get it to do what other products can do but that is life.

 An answer to Dons question about who the audience are  is helpdesk , management and technical staff. Basically the requirement is to have a simple interface that can be used by helpdesk and non technical out of hours management for being notified about interruption to services. The services need to be defined by all the dependancies ie, applications/servers/networking so that if a service is showing as down the out of hours support is able to intelligently direct the support call to the team that is responsible for the area.

 IE: If email service depends on 6 servers, 12 application/process, 6 network devices and something in the chain is unavailable the technical resource is dispatched effectively.

The also dont want to have to log into multiple systems or interface.

 :-) one day im sure solarwinds will be able to do it all. Unless I can find some clever way to integrate our current nagious that monitors the servers and parts of services into the solarwinds User Interface.