Alternatives to nagios

[Preston Kutzner]

On May 11, 2009, at 11:52 AM, Mark Miller wrote:

> I've been looking at Nagios as a possible network manager.  Someone  
> on the list mentioned there were others I might look at.  Everything  
> I'm finding on the net is pretty dated (2006-2007).
>
> Here's my situation.
>
> I'm a high school English teacher who has a PC computer lab of 28  
> computers running 9.04.  The installation is brand new and we're  
> just starting to learn how to use it effectively.
>
> I would like to have a monitoring tool installed on the teacher  
> machine (it's not a server) that will "watch" the technical aspects  
> of all 28 systems.
>
> This would be something down the lines of Italc (which is a teacher- 
> manager piece that allows control of the student desktops and  
> broadcasting of activity on the teacher machine for the students to  
> see) except that it would watch the technical side.

I don't know of any one-stop software like this available on the Linux  
platform right now.  However, at least regarding remote control of  
desktops, this functionality is in-built on Ubuntu.  System ->  
Preferences -> Remote Desktop (and likewise Applications -> Internet - 
 > Remote Desktop Viewer.)  As for watching technical aspects of the  
machines, it might help to know what aspects your looking to monitor.   
There are several different monitoring solutions available in Linux.   
Unfortunately, most of them are server daemons that watch network  
devices in the background.

You mentioned (in a portion I snipped) that the teachers will be using  
their machines as both their normal workstations as well as to monitor  
the classroom computers.  You would be able to run something such as  
Nagios, Cacti, or the like from the desktop machine just fine.  The  
only real differentiation between a Linux desktop installation and a  
server installation is the set of packages installed by default.   
Servers usually don't have a GUI installed, and generally have fewer  
packages installed overall.  So, Nagios and Apache could be installed  
on the teacher's workstation without much of an impact, if any, for  
them.

HTH.

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