Definitely.  Sorry for the long email, I assume you're interested since you
asked, if not skip to the bottom for my top-7 list in quick summary ;)

I'm currently migrating (and significantly expanding upon) my current very
customized Nagios deployment.  I've got >5,000 hosts, >20,000 frequent service
checks across my "enterprise" composed of several international locations and
WAN links, making extremely extensive use of service dependencies and event
handlers, as well as being very dependent on the parent directive (among others
obviously ;).  Nagios has some extreme limitations, but works very dependably
as an alerting mechanism.  The addition of trending/graphing, combined with the
core infrastructure is one of the few ways to improve on it, IMO.  Or to make a
superior package.

In the process of testing and rolling out zenoss, I'm quite impressed by the
number of things that have been included, but my biggest concern is that there
are a large number of features that are not documented well (if at all), or are
"included" but non-functional.  Specifically, WMI access,
event-handler/response script usage, the RPC/XML API, and a number of other
items I've attempted to use are either downright broken or there is no way to
access without doing serious digging through the underlying code to glean some
knowledge... that's not a very efficient way of trying to implement something.

That being said, I'm not trying to be negative, but give you some creative
criticism.  I'm making a serious effort to utilize what does work, figure out
what doesn't and document it, etc.  I've already written some scripts to handle
integrating Zenoss with other tools using what IS known about the API and
system to interact with it.  I'm concurrently evaluating Zabbix and Hyperic,
both of which are missing some core functionality that you have already (but
sometimes doesn't work), and flaws of their own to be sure.

What I'd like to see most out of the next few releases of zenoss:

1) Stability of the core daemons, and better (useful) alerting on their 
failures.
2) Functional WMI system with documentation on use.
3) Xenpack documentation, and a system that works.
4) API documentation, abilities, examples, how to replicate GUI actions, etc.
5) Better documentation of "event handler" equivalents.
6) Network parent device capabilities, needs to support >1 device
7) Service dependency support, integrated with event handlers.

So most of the groundwork for that appears to already be laid very firmly.  I
know from the list that problems I've seen are seen by others, and are likely
being worked on already.  The topic of documentation is a sticky one, everyone
(including me) would rather be "doing" rather than writing for posterity, but
it's hard for new adopters to get much use out of the product (and stick with
it), and eventually buy something if it's TOO difficult ;)


Thanks for creating such an exemplary piece of code so far.  Lots of people
have "tried" to do better than Nagios, without much success or even hope...
without contributing back anything of worth to the community.  While you guys
have gone on a tangent, it's obviously with skill and an actual goal.  Doing 
well.


Cheers,


/eli



mrhinkle wrote:
> We have noticed that many Zenoss users are former Nagios users. To help
> understand what features you liked in Nagios and replicate those
> features in Zenoss we need your help. If you have thoughts please
> respond to the poll and offer any other insights you might have to make
> your migration from Nagios to Zenoss more rewarding. If you have other
> thoughts not addressed in the questions on the poll please expand upon
> them in the comments. Thank you for your participation.
> 
> Mark
> The Zenoss Community Dude
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -------------------- m2f --------------------
> 
> Read this topic online here:
> http://community.zenoss.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=9446#9446
> 
> -------------------- m2f --------------------
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> zenoss-users mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://lists.zenoss.org/mailman/listinfo/zenoss-users
> 
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