At work we decided to implement Nagios as a monitoring tool. A colleague started to install and configure Nagios Core and some add-ons. But I was not really happy with it. Nagios Core is very uncomfortable and complicated and the add-ons are not mature enough for productive usage. That’s why I decided to search for another solution based on Nagios. After looking for appropriate products I choose op5 (www.op5.com). I started to install and configure op5 at home on a Centos 5.5 i386 based virtual machine. Nagios himself remains complex but op5 make life easier. The most important feature is the web based configuration tool of all Nagios settings. I implemented a small test lab and I was surprised how many Check-Scripts op5 offers. Op5 supports VMware ESX, several HP based SNMP queries, and lots of more. A very nice tool! Below you see the tactical overview of my home lab. 🙂
