Thursday, December 1, 2011

Managed and SysAdmin Services comparison

Following is some of the Analysis that I had done for Network Managed services a while earlier. Just sharing it across for a wider audience:

There are few service providers available, who are providing Managed and SysAdmin Services for IaaS Cloud. Following table provides details on service offerings by these known providers compared with Nagios Monitoring (last column), which is an Open-Source network monitoring tool. Though Nagios might not have all the features provided by these providers, but it will provide comparison of where Nagios stands w.r.t. other tools in the market.

A brief description of the offerings being compared is as follows:

Freedom OSS Managed Services:

Freedom OSS’s post production care services cover scaling, maintaining, monitoring and security applications as well as the underlying Cloud Infrastructure. All instances created using Freedom’s managed service come automatically pre-installed with monitoring agents capable of monitoring all low level OS attributes and all common server applications such as web servers, databases and other executable processes. This solution natively subscribes to the AWS CloudWatch even stream related to that instance which allows managed service to have full visibility of the health of the infrastructure.



GroundWork OS Monitor Enterprise:

GroundWork Monitor Enterprise Edition delivers a highly scalable monitoring platform designed to meet the needs of complex, large and distributed environments. Enterprise Edition provides availability and performance visibility in large, heterogeneous and distributed environments by utilizing industry-standards (SNMP, syslog, WMI) and de-facto standards (NRPE, Nagios plug-ins) for data collection.

GroundWork Monitor Enterprise can serve as a customer’s only network management system or serve as part of an integrated solution for IT Service Management that includes products from a selection of vendors. An Enterprise deployment may integrate the outputs of multiple third party monitoring tools or be easily configured to report its results to the consoles of other major monitoring tools.



Nagios Monitoring Tool:

Nagios® is a system and network monitoring application. It watches hosts and services that you specify, alerting you when things go bad and when they get better.

Nagios was originally designed to run under Linux, although it should work under most other unices as well.

Some of the many features of Nagios include:

  • Monitoring of network services (SMTP, POP3, HTTP, NNTP, PING, etc.)
  • Monitoring of host resources (processor load, disk usage, etc.)
  • Simple plugin design that allows users to easily develop their own service checks
  • Parallelized service checks
  • Ability to define network host hierarchy using "parent" hosts, allowing detection of and distinction between hosts that are down and those that are unreachable
  • Contact notifications when service or host problems occur and get resolved (via email, pager, or user-defined method)
  • Ability to define event handlers to be run during service or host events for proactive problem resolution
  • Automatic log file rotation
  • Support for implementing redundant monitoring hosts
  • Optional web interface for viewing current network status, notification and problem history, log file, etc.

OpenNMS:

OpenNMS, the application, is the first enterprise-grade network management platform to be developed under the open-source model.

The goal is for OpenNMS to be a truly distributed, scalable platform for all aspects of the FCAPS (Fault, Configuration, Accounting, Performance, Security) network management model, and to make this platform available to both open source and commercial applications.

Currently, OpenNMS focuses on three main areas:

  • Service Polling - determining service availability and reporting on same.
  • Data Collection - collecting, storing and reporting on network information as well as generating thresholds.
  • Event and Notification Management - receiving events, both internal and external, and using those events to feed a robust notification system, including escalation.

OpenNMS features:

· http://technocrat.watson-wilson.ca/blosxom/computer/onmsreview.html?seemore=y

· http://www.opennms.org/wiki/Docu-overview



Comparison Table:

Features
Freedom OSS
GroundWork OS
Nagios Monitoring Tool
OpenNMS
Instance availability alert (up/down)
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Critical processes availability
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
System resource over / under utilization
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Application feature availability
Yes
Yes
Email notification
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
SMS / MMS
Yes
SMS
SMS, Pager, XMPP, Growl
Integration with enterprise datacenter ecosystem
No
Yes
No
Yes
Self-control over monitoring
No
Yes
Yes
Yes
User-level control with access rights
No
Yes
No
Yes + LDAP support
Enterprise Management systems (e.g. Tivoli, HP Openview)
Yes
Yes
No
Yes
It is itself an enterprise management
Cross metrics correlation
Yes
No
Trend analysis
Yes
Yes
No
Yes
Automatic instance scaling
Yes
Yes
No
No
Backup and data synchronization
Yes
No
No
No
Security
Yes
No
No
Spring security
Industry security compliance & Data privacy
yes
No
no
Available support level
Yes
Yes
No
no
Amazon EC2 support
Yes
Yes
No
no
Eucalyptus Private cloud support
No
Yes
No
no
SNMP support
No
No
Snmp plugin available
Full support
Auto-discovery of nodes
Yes
No
Yes
Layer-2 & 3 device support
No
No
Yes
Scalability
No
Yes
Yes
Platform supported
Linux
Linux,
Linux, windows
Linux, MAC OS, solaris, Windows, FreeBSD





Good article on Nagios Vs OpenNMS

http://www.rootdev.com/tech/opennms-vs-nagios



Enterprise-level Monitoring System Comparison:

An extensive comparison of various network monitoring systems was made and results are available at the URL - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_network_monitoring_systems

HP OpenView

http://www.openview.hp.com/uploads/emanate_white_paper.pdf

HDFS explained in a nice comic way

I found following article very easy, explaining the functionality of HDFS. A must read for people working on Hadoop:

https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B-zw6KHOtbT4MmRkZWJjYzEtYjI3Ni00NTFjLWE0OGItYTU5OGMxYjc0N2M1