2

I've taken the liberty to test both SCOM 2007 and Zenoss and found the following:

SCOM 2007

Pros:

  • Great MS Windows server monitoring and reporting
  • In-depth configuration and easily integrates into a "MS datacenter"

Cons:

  • limited network device monitoring support (without 3rd party plugins)
  • expensive
  • difficult learning curve

Zenoss

Pros:

  • Open Source (free)
  • decent server monitoring for Windows, great monitoring for Linux
  • decent network device monitoring

Cons:

  • not as in-depth as SCOM (for Windows at least)

So my question to you folks is this:

Given the above, and given that I'm trying to monitor 55 Windows servers, 1 Linux server, 2 ESX servers, and Juniper equipment...which would you recommend?

TheCleaner
  • 33,047

4 Answers4

2

The maths add up for me. 55 > 2 > 1 > ? = SCOM

Also, to be honest, the amount of stuff there is to monitor on a Windows machine, with all the various flavors of Microsoft software sitting on them, for me, would make a tool specialized in monitoring that product a priority.

Lastly, I believe SCOM 2007 can monitor several *nix flavours, ESX, and any SNMP enabled device, natively, free of charge.

Izzy
  • 8,253
1

Makew sure you have looked at thew latest release of SCOM 2007 r2. I'd use SCOM, SCVMM and the quest juniper plugin. You can alaso simply do SNMP monitoring of the juniper stuff but it depends on what sort of reporting you need. You could also work on converting that last little linux box over to windows and save yourself the yearly support cost. If you are stuck with it the cross platform extensions for scom will let you monitor it as well.

Jim B
  • 24,276
0
  1. SCOM 2007 R2, 6.1.7221 - My beginning experiences... so you can know about the golem

1.1. SCOM Web does not like Firefox 3.6.3, neither with IE user agent.

1.2. Documentation in the SCOM WEB leads to online documentation!

1.3. Reporting exportation 1.3.1. Export to HTML create a new HTML format .mhtml format (only usable on IE of course...) 1.3.2. and when you rename your file to .html, the content of the file becames a binary file:

...
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/related;
 boundary="----=_NextPart_01C35DB7.4B204430"
X-MSSQLRS-ProducerVersion: V9.00.4035.00

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
...

1.3.3 Manual selection for global reporting for more than 10 servers seems not to work.

1.4. And there is more !

Just try to create a 2 weeks report, or a month report + several days: you are stuck on monthly (end 31) report.

If you have the luck to choose, to me it is pretty clear:

(2) I know a lot of people using Nagios (http://www.nagios.org/) and even Nagvis (http://www.nagvis.org/).

I'm sure that OpenNMS (http://www.opennms.org/wiki/Main_Page) is also a good candidate [Java side].

(3) http://monitoringforge.org/ - For a global opensource forge on monitoring tools

0

55 Wintel presence would outweigh the choice scale to SCOM 2007 if cost is not a problem. SCOM has native support and advanced tools for windows (naturally) and it is still able to monitor *nix platforms without the need for agents (albeit a little limited to SNMP and SSH but compare that to the number of win vs nix on the network).

Also with "cost" out of the way with the purchase of SCOM, I think a couple of dollars more for agents to VMware and Juniper devices wouldn't be such startling difference compared to just plain vanilla SCOM.

afx
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