Good Agentless monitoring packages?

Tue Nov 25 17:04:57 PST 2003

Quoting Roy S. Rapoport (rsr at inorganic.org):
> On Tue, Nov 25, 2003 at 04:21:37PM -0800, Michael T. Halligan wrote:
> > I'm looking for a decent agentless monitoring package.. I've been using
> > netsaint/nagios for a few years, and like it, but I need something that's
> > a bit easier to chew on, using already included tools like snmp or rpcstats ..
> 
> You're talking to a bunch of sysadmins -- you can probably get a little
> more technical than "a bit easier to chew on." :)
...
> If you want to stay as pure SNMP as possible, you probably want to check
> out MRTG, though it's much more capable in the trending arena than in the
> alarming arena.

I try to think of SNMP (v3) as a reasonable transport method
for a lot of things.

In pulling, I can get about any data I want.
In pushing, I can trip scripts/programs as I need.
Mutterings by users of embedded (and less embedded)
to allow an snmp-set that comes via authenticated and encrypted V3
to reboot a box.

I use rrdtool to graph things - been really eye opening to
some folks here to see WHEN it starts to swap heavily and
how many database users are hitting something.

Events can be tripped as well.

I'm running some snmpget stuff LOCALLY, checking thresholds
and emits traps (to UniCenter) for several things.

snmpdf is really handy when you've got 100 servers (to show "df" info
without having to log in).  Web front ends are easy to whip up with
PHP or perl. It's a transport method - and net-snmp with the HOST MIB
gives LOTS of useful information.

But  yes, more information would get you better answers.