"we use Nagios."

I've heard a lot of good stuff about Nagios, but I've never used it myself. I've been using BB for almost 6 years now, and it pretty much does everything I need.

"I use perl massively to write plugins for Nagios."

Same here with regards BB. At the previous company I worked for, we were running about a dozen customised tests - all written in Perl :)
Where I am now, most of the servers we monitor are windoze boxen. I would have liked to have written our customised tests in Perl, but it wasn't really practical. It would have meant either installing ActivePerl on about 300 machines, or doing something with PAR. We've actually resorted to (ugh!) VBScript at the moment - which is (sortof) working okay, except for some of the incredibly ridiculous hoops you have to jump though to do the most basic things with VBScript - such as parsing a bit of text ;) So I would still like to migrate everything to Perl if I get the chance :)

"Furthermore, we use some perl scripts to generate the Nagios config files from a machine database that we maintain."

Yup, again we do the same with BB. In fact, we've gone a step further and completely dispensed with the standard BB display interface, and built one of our own using Perl/CGI. A bit more about that is here.

Cheers, Darren :)

Hi,

I also use Nagios at the company and I also do Windows box test with it without problems and out of the box, because what you really do is testing services that run on a machine. But the windows boxes can be count with the hands. :-)

I think the way to extending it (scripts) is very useful, because this way you can even write testers for special net services you could have developed.

Initial configuration could be a little annoying, but I think it's worth. I also like the idea to have a central server where all the network/supervise tools are installed, and not having daemons on the machines that give me some feedback.

By the side, Nagios with the Nuvola theme looks very nice :-D

Regards,

fmerges at irc.freenode.net

Hi,


"what you really do is testing services that run on a machine"

Not quite for us here. We also monitor partition sizes a, load and loads of other stuff. A bit OT, but for that we mainly use NSclient for Windows: a little service that - as opposed to NRPE - does not need it's config file locally, so I just need to get my Windows-colleagues to install and start the service and that's it.


"windows boxes can be count with the hands"

Unfortunately not here... :-(
Regards,
svenXY