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