Octave Orgeron wrote: > Hi Ben, > > I wonder about the usefulness of such tools as well. Since most medium to > large shops are using BMC, HP OpenView, or Tivoli, they normally have their > own agents, modules, and plug-ins. Some of them piggy-back onto the SunMC > framework to get more detailed info on Sun servers. Ultimately though, I find > it all rather complicated to configure let alone manage. Luckily, I haven't > had to deal with such things in a long time. But it's an area that I think > needs addressing in OpenSolaris. The biggest issue I've seen in the > commercial area is the need for custom (extra cost) modules to monitor the > things people really care about on modern Solaris servers (SMF, Zones, FMA, > etc.). The other one being that some of the products out there are just > running scripts and parsing output, thusly putting extra load on servers.. > even Nagios is guilty of this. I have seen some nice monitoring tools such as > UpTime which is more lightweight and gets the basics right. >
We use UpTime at Joyent... its a decent tool, I agree that it handles the basics fairly well but its customization is a PITA. > But what should be the standard in OpenSolaris? We've had Sun's > SNMP/CIM/WBEM, net-snmp, and SunMC in Solaris. Seeing how SunMC will at some > point transition to xVM Opscenter, it might make sense to get those guys to > chime in on the topic. But I still think the issue of having a generic > framework that other products and tools can leverage makes the most sense. > But there should be extra value into it that's specific to OpenSolaris so > that users and customers don't have a reason to toss it out the window. > Otherwise, what's the point? > I haven't dug deep into xVM Ops Center to see how its doing its interaction. Given the state of Solaris CIM/WBEM I'm going to assume its no using it at all. Furthermore, one of the big focuses of CIM/WBEM is physical platform (SP) Out-of-band management, but it doesn't look like Dell's DRAC or ILOM support it. For all these reasons I think WBEM is dead and obsolete. > It also kinda brings up other things that are in the mix. Management tools > for Solaris/OpenSolaris is another area that's rather murky. In Solaris we > had SMC, which most people ignored due to its bloated and unusable ways from > before S10. Then in S10 webmin was included which has some great integration > with Solaris specific features. In addition there is the webconsole BUI that > popped up. It's a nice interface for ZFS, SunCluster, N1GE, APOC, etc. > Unfortunately, most sysadmins are not aware or care about these tools a whole > lot. There really should be one framework for doing single point or > centralized management of Solaris/OpenSolaris servers. > I'm not in the enterprise space currently, but I'm seeing these big mega-management tools seem to fade into obsolecence. A good metric tends to be whether or not people thing SNMP is a management protocol or a monitoring protocol. Most people that I see view it as the latter, a read-only way to get metrics. Maybe xVM Ops Center will push work to bring it all back together so there is such as centralized management capability such as you suggest, but I'm just not seeing it right now. > As of yet, I have not seen a real direction from Sun. Most of the management > tools in the OpenSolaris space are really desktop driven and not sysadmin > driven for managing the enterprise. While it's great that Sun is focusing on > the desktop, it's not making Solaris sysadmins work easier. While experienced > folks such as Ben and myself don't mind the CLI at all and live there.. it > doesn't help bring in new people. The big challenges for companies around > managing Solaris today are: > > 1. No Budget for experienced sysadmins, let alone training. > 2. Most staff is still stuck in the Solaris 8 era and have little experience > or knowledge of Solaris 9 or Solaris 10 > 3. Lack of in-house knowledge leads to customers being less likely to use new > features in Solaris 10 or even use OpenSolaris > 4. Out-sourcing generally leads to lower skill sets. > > While I believe that companies today should invest in training their staff, > it's usually the last thing companies spend money on next to security. Sun > and the OpenSolaris community should try to fix this. The easier we make > OpenSolaris to use and adopt, the greater chance Sun has of getting the > adoption rate up and really helping companies. Absolutely agreed. Training is still a huge problem. I tried to help fill that gap with blogs and such, but its a big job and we as both a community and a profession haven't really come together to tackle the big problems. I've suggested working together with an organization such as USENIX or LOPSA to work together on something, but I just don't see it happening in any formal sense. The vendors and the sysadmins out there are all off doing their own thing and only a grass-roots effort will make an headway. benr. _______________________________________________ sysadmin-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/sysadmin-discuss
