Questions - Features
Francois Mikus
fmikus at acktomic.com
Tue Apr 5 13:37:33 EDT 2005
Hello,
Having worked with a multitude of monitoring tools, I would like to
better understand where argus is compared to other products.
I think argus has an interesting approach and would like to learn more
about it. Here are the features that I am not sure are supported by
argus but would like to see in state manager:
- support for remote agent running on various platforms which return
information like: state, service, message
Similar to big brother agents, nagios agents. An easy way to extend
things without re-inventing the wheel is supporting nagios and/or Big
brother agent communications. Supporting multiple event messages per
message is also very nice(bulk messages), this avoids the event bloat
associated with Nagios.
- using queue-ing for receiving events. This insures that events from
remote agents are never lost when the computer is too busy to process
incoming events . This enables better uses of processing ressources,
resiliency, possibility of dropping low priority events. I do not know
any open-source nms's that really support sophisticated level queuing.
- correlation engine that supports all service checks and events with
hierarchies, circular and other types. This seems to be supported!
- support for maintenance periods in alerts and reporting. This would
include recurring periods, one time scheduled periods, administrative
reason, contact name.
- flapping alert recognition events, alert acknowledgment, with
administrative reason, contact name. Acknowledgement via web, email, etc.
- pager blackout periods based on support criteria.
Example: Where for some checks, if the service goes down, do not page
between midnight and 8am. Send an email(or other type of non-intrusive
alert) and queue the page until 8am.
- generating a unique ticket number for alerts so that they can be
tracked by helpdesk applications or easily referred to by technical
support team.
- support for external actions on events. The external script should be
user provided.
- same colour/event scheme as big brother. (colour for no data, red for
alert, yellow for warning, colour for stale data) Also have color icons
with a twist, for acknowledged alarms, or other special events. This
makes it easy to see that someone is working on a problem.
To win over people and developpers you need to support user hooks:
Ability to create your own services checks, external actions, support
for third party agents. A monitoring platform should be able to leverage
external utilities and also *be* leveraged by external utilities. No
system is in a vaccum.
I think argus is very interesting, it would gain from exposure, but I am
still not clear if it is ready for replacing nagios based systems?
Look forward to seeing more and congratulations on putting a quality
system together.
Francois Mikus
Acktomic Net Architects Inc.
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