Comments on: Centreon – Nagios remixed

By: Bruce

Bruce — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 17:46:30 +0000

I would disagree that Centreon is narrower in scope, particularly in the open source variety. From what I can tell Centreon 2.0 has ALL of the features of Groundwork Enterprise, the commercial offering of GW. What’s missing from your perspective?

Centreon is not new either. It’s been around for approximately 4 years, previously as Oreon. I used Oreon early on and found it a bit unpolished and cumbersome to maintain, but from what I can tell it has evolved and matured and Centreon 2.0 looks fully realized. GW is 2nd generation as well, but even it has its share of problems, in all editions.

Hard to say which community is stronger. I find the GW forums are not all that active and the company representatives are less involved in the community version forums with fewer answers offered than the commercial forum. I’ve seen bugs that I’ve reported in the forums persist across several releases. When I using Oreon the biggest problem was the language barrier. At that point they were maintaing two sets of forums, french and english and the french forums were more active and answered quicker. Now there seems to be a unified set of Centreon forums, with a mix of french and english posts. Seems to be fairly current and active.

By: Matt Simmons

Matt Simmons — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 16:42:10 +0000

I found that, then they made me register to download the binary packages. I didn’t try the VM. It just seemed like a lot of hassle to find the download page, then register to get a copy.

By: Jack Hughes

Jack Hughes — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 16:39:15 +0000

Oops, the Opsview download section is available and they do have a virtual machine and a number of binary installers for Linux. It is very well hidden though. Why not put the download page in the primary navigation of the site? It is probably the first thing most people are going to look for when they go to an open source project. Source code isn’t the first thing though

By: Jack Hughes

Jack Hughes — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 16:30:28 +0000

@Matt – yeah, can’t see a download link anywhere just links to the source code. A virtual machine would be nice… always handy for checking a project out without having to mess around with a boat load of configuration and component installation.

By: Matt Simmons

Matt Simmons — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 16:22:37 +0000

Seriously. The configuration to that tool can become insanely complex. Also, you might find this interesting. I just got turned on to opsview: http://www.opsview.org/

It looks promising, but their site makes it difficult to download anything.

By: Jack Hughes

Jack Hughes — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 16:12:09 +0000

@Matt – just shows how important books are to open source projects especially with more complex tools like Nagios.

By: Matt Simmons

Matt Simmons — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 14:03:09 +0000

The first time I set up Nagios, I didn’t know how to do it, so all of my host entries are 15 lines. My service entries are all 8 or 9. All of my commands live in one file.

Then I read Nagios Enterprise Network Monitoring, and that changed my entire world view.

The new Nagios install I’m working with has a sort of hierarchy of config files separated into directories. Hosts go in their own file (which seems harder when you hear it, but it’s much more logical) inside the directory that they belong in:

(that might get mangled)

My service and host declarations use the multiple inheritance model. In other words, it opened a whole new world to me.

Just thought I’d share I’ll have to check out Centreon. It sounds really cool. Thanks for the link