On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 06:05:51PM -0400, Jason Dixon wrote:
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> On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 01:11:41PM -0700, James Peltier wrote:
> > 
> > Being as I have never used Reconnoiter or Circonus, would you care to elaborate 
> > as to where these products "suck less" then Nagios or other solutions?  I am 
> > looking into replacing out very aged monitoring system now and Nagios is the one 
> > that seems to stand out the most, although Zabbix and Munin look good in their 
> > own rights.
> 
> Theo Schlossnagle (our CEO and the architect of Reconnoiter) answers it
> pretty well in his talk from OSCON (requires flash, sorry).
> 
> http://omniti.com/video/noit-oscon-demo
>  
> In my words, Reconnoiter was designed to overcome a lot of the
> performance and design problems native in Nagios and Cacti.  It does a
> lot of the things that either of those do, although it was designed
> foremost as a highly scalable metrics collection "engine".  Like Nagios,
> the types of checks it can perform is virtually limitless.  Unlike
> Nagios, it is highly performant by design.  Checks are deployed across
> scout "agents" in your network, giving you both perspective and
> non-persective collection points.
> 
> The web UI in Reconnoiter is adequate.  One of its really nice features
> is the cli console, allowing you to configure checks and metrics in an
> environment familiar to Cisco admins.

Though from cli you can't reuse templates, which are very handy - thus
for me checks are added in config file. Admittedly reloading of it is
pretty painless.

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> That said, the bread-and-butter
> in Reconnoiter is the sort of graphs which you can create and recreate
> with ease.  Unlike trending tools like Cacti, you can easily correlate
> dissimilar metrics in a single graph, with just a few clicks.  Stack
> sets, composite datapoints and RPN conversion of source and display
> values are just a few of the other features that are easy to implement
> within Reconnoiter.

Well, for this it would be highly appreciated if you would expand on the
templating system that there are seeds of present ;) Clicking through
creating graphs for those 20 metrics each on 20 machines is a pain...

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> > Guidance is always appreciated. :)
> 
> Reconnoiter is not for everyone.  It's a very powerful system, but it's
> not intended to be a drop-in replacement for other ECA/Trending systems.
> It takes time and effort to get value out of it, but it offers some
> Capacity Planning and Root Cause Analysis capabilities that aren't
> available or usable in the alternatives.

Agreed, it takes a while to figure out how to set it up, but the graphs
are pretty impressive. And I already at least once post-factum created a
set of graphs showing correlation between various metrics on multiple
machines, showing where possibly the problem came from.

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> -- 
> Jason Dixon
> DixonGroup Consulting
> http://www.dixongroup.net/

-- 
viq