System monitoring is an important aspect of IT Management. Knowing when things go down and being able to predict problems before they happen are crucial in an enterprise environment. But, the keywords here are IT Management, as important as monitoring is, Management is doubly so. To borrow a phrase from old Ben Franklin, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

We’ve used Nagios (minimally) for monitoring and most recently WebMin for linux server management. However, as we all know, where there’s 1, there is many, so I decided to look around and see what alternatives exist.

A simple google search for “Free System Monitoring” or “Nagios Alternative” gives us a ton of results, the list below lists the more popular ones I founds

1. Nagios (paid) & Nagios Core (free) & Ninja (Nagios spinoff)

2. Zenoss (paid) & Zenoss Core (free)

3. Cacti and RRDTool?

A similar search for “Systems Management” or “Webmin Alternatives” gives us this list

1. Webmin

2. Puppet

3. Spacewalk

However, instead of recreating the proverbial wheel, how-bout I just link some of (what I think) are the better reviews already on the net?

http://ostatic.com/blog/evolving-as-a-systems-administrator

http://www.linux.com/learn/tutorials/616413-zenoss-your-all-seeing-network-eye-in-the-sky

http://www.serverfocus.org/nagios-vs-cacti-vs-zabbix-vs-zenoss

http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2009/09/top-5-best-network-monitoring-tools/

http://poormanstech.blogspot.com/2007/01/alternatives-to-nagios.html (old post but I like the blog name!)

http://myhosting.com/blog/2011/07/network-monitoring-vps-nagios-opennms-zenoss-more/

Side Links:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1234219

http://askubuntu.com/questions/112243/are-there-any-open-source-alternative-to-landscape

I for one will be trying Zenoss and Spacewalk, I already have some experience with Nagios and Webmin. Maybe I’ll post my opinions later one!