Best Practice Linux Guide: Monitoring Tools [INFOGRAPHIC]

We compare the most popular monitoring tools for your network.

Monitoring is the key to maintaining a healthy infrastructure, and there are lots of products that claim to offer you Linux Support. But which product is the best for you? 

We compare the most popular monitoring tools for your network.

Monitoring is the key to maintaining a healthy infrastructure, and there are lots of products that claim to offer you Linux Support. But which product is the best for you? 

MS SCOM

System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) is hosted on a Windows Server, and uses a piece of software installed on each client to monitor and relay information to the server. Not available on Linux hosting, requires a Windows server, but Linux clients are supported.

Benefits:   

Application Management (Applications as a Service), Service Delivery (Managing services for users), Infrastructure Management (Configuration, provision and monitoring of infrastructure).

Support:   

Various licences available to meet your needs.

Verdict: 

A flexible solution to infrastructure management, the inclusion of Linux Support is a welcome addition.

Nagios

Nagios is considered the industry standard infrastructure monitoring tool, it’s a modular package allowing reconfiguration to address your needs. Nagios has a strong history having been around for at least 12 years and has proven itself in very large installations.

Benefits:   

Monitoring of infrastructure, host and probe data. Since Nagios is community based there is a very rich collection of plugins for monitoring throughout the stack – hardware, operating system, middleware through to application. Obviously these plugins can be used by Nagios clones as well. As it is completely open based on a simple API, it requires very little modification of the monitored system and has a very lightweight agent.

Support:   

Various packages to suit your organisation.

Verdict:

An adaptable and powerful tool, works well, with Linux Support. Nagios is increasingly being integrated into automated Linux environments with plugin packages available for all major distributions and integration with tools like puppet allowing automated configuration. 

OpsView  

OpsView is built on Nagios Core, so provides the same core functionality, but has been further enhanced to provide additional services.

Benefits:   

Monitoring of infrastructure, host and probe data, Autodiscovery, Suite of reports, fully scalable, SMS messaging.

Support:   

Range of licences, with an Open Source core version.

Verdict:

A great suite of tools, providing powerful information via its dashboards. 

IBM Tivoli

IBM’s service management tool covers a spread of services, asset management and configuration, extensive monitoring and automation.

Benefits:   

Service dashboards to view status at a glance, Asset management, Automation of services to reduce resource usage.

Support:   

Various packages available to meet the needs of your business.

Verdict:

A broad package of services, comes with Linux Support, and worth investigating.  

There are many more monitoring tools, such as Merethis Centreon, Zabbix, Big Brother, VMware’s vFabric Hyperic, GroundWork, Zenoss and Big Brother. All offer similar features, and it would be prudent to explore all avenues before committing.