On Wed, Oct 13, 1999 at 09:36:02AM +0100, Roger Burton West wrote:
> On or about Tue, Oct 12, 1999 at 03:06:43PM -0400, Jonathan A. Zdziarski typed:
> >lots of folks have switched to the commercial software 'netcool' which
> >runs about $100,000 or so. it's much nicer, but obviously nocol has its
> >own value in being free.
>
> "Much nicer" is an interesting way of putting it. "A total waste of
> money" would be more accurate - the probes don't work, all the IP-
> based probes _insist on_ DNS rather than IP numbers - so useful if
> your nameserver falls over, all of a sudden all the probes fail -
> and you need a high-end system to run it on.
There wasn't really an appropriate point for me to chime in anywhere,
but here goes.
For those who wanted to know: http://www.micromuse.com/ is the bunch
that write and sell it. Our company is theoretically an authorised
NetCool Systems Integrator, but this is for some strange reasons -
something to do with me being one of the 'old' Micromuse folk etc.
There might even be some of my thoughts / code somewhere in there
still.
On the subject of NetCOOL, the people developing this stuff are human,
and if there are specific things wrong (and you have spent in many
cases over $1M) talk to them. Avoid the sales geek. If all else fails,
I can ask on your behalf - but my company is in business, and
consultancy costs - sorry again.
> I've looked at a lot of different monitoring packages, and they're
> all horribly expensive (or freeware). I haven't yet seen one that
> worked as well as NOCOL.
http://www.netsaint.org/ knocks the testicles off NOCOL and NetCOOL
for basic networks monitoring and alerts. While still on the mailing
list, we gave up on NOCOL both for ourselves and for a client who
required basic network monitoring. Sorry. It is going nowhere.
> >> Has anyone got nocol doing hierarchical conditions, so that when a link
> >> is down you dont also get paged with SMTP, Web, Pop, Imap, Ftp and everything
> >> else being down too?
>
> No... but on the other hand I have got a once-every-five-minutes cron
> job that tells me all the system status changes in that time.
Netsaint does a form of parenting.
For other stuff see http://www.riversoft.com/ as well, but last I
looked the web site was "conceptual" hype.
Regards,
--
Peter Galbavy
Knowledge Matters Ltd
http://www.knowledge.com/
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