Hello,
I am currently evaluating Hyperic. We currently use Mon and Zabbix for network monitoring of cca 200 machines (Solaris, Linux, FreeBSD and few Windows boxes). We also evaluated Pandora and Nagios, but we got rid of them. It is not that easy to migrate all those monitors to different system, but I am pretty convinced, that Hyperic HQ would be great upgrade. I have a few questions though:
1.) We monitor several networks of cca 30-40 machines, which are using private address space. We would like to have one centralized monitoring. In documentation I saw, that server also connects back to agents. What is this for? Is it possible to have only agent->server connection? It is not a problem to let agents behind NAT connect outside to the central monitoring server, but connecting the other way is more difficult.
Of course we could build another server, but it is nice to have centralized monitoring. Is it possible for example to have parent-child server relationship (so child server, which will be inside that network will report and communicate with central parent server?).
2.) Is it possible to define remote checks for server? For example in mon, we currently have check, that will send e-mail to server, connect to it's pop3 port, login, download the message and compare body hash and then delete the message. It is done remotely (currently from central mon machine), but it would be nice to assign this monitor to a particular machine. (BTW: does Hyperic have some check? We found it quite useful, since it does not only monitor a running service, but it shows, that "e-mail works for users". Non working could be cause by dozen different problems, which are more difficult to check, i.e. antivirus software working, correct DNS MX records, ...).
3.) Is it possible to write plugins in Java (or any other language)? I looked for examples of plugins, but they are mostly some kind of XML description. I would for example like to add CIFS monitoring support of Samba, NFS server monitoring using recently open-sourced Sun's NFS client library, etc.
Thanks,
Juraj.