[wplug] mildly OT: RHN & Solaris

[Poyner, Brandon]

> On Fri, 2005-08-19 at 09:30 -0400, Vanco, Don wrote:
> > Looks like Red Hat RHN Satellite is going to offer Solaris 
> monitoring /
> > management as well:
> > http://www.redhat.com/magazine/010aug05/features/rhn_new/
> > 
> > 	Interesting.  Adds a slight bit of justification to the $13.5k
> > price tag for those with mixed environs.  Other interesting 
> links at the
> > bottom of this page...
> > 
> > Don
> 
> I cannot even begin to imagine why they wouldn't use NRPE 
> (Nagios Remote
> Plug-in Executor) and Nagios plugins for monitoring remote hosts.
> Initially I thought that it was because then everyone would 
> just switch
> to Nagios anyways, but many companies would still pay Red Hat for the
> support.
> 
> It would be a win for Red Hat. Since NRPE runs in many 
> environments, it would bring their monitoring to AIX, HPUX, and other
UNIX systems.
> 
> It would be a win for users. Red Hat might improve the Nagios 
> plugins or NRPE in the process, and those not looking for support
would still
> benefit from the cleanups.

I really like Nagios, but I think RedHat is trying to take RHN further.
For instance most Nagios setups only alert you to the problem, you have
to fix it yourself.  From the looks of things not only can RHN alert you
that your load average is high on a server, but you can tell RHN to
repurpose machines to spread the load over multiple machines.  That
makes huge assumptions that you have a load balancer and appropriate
storage.  I don't know how automated you can make it, but if you can't
now perhaps you will be able to soon.

Brandon Poyner
Network Engineer III
CCAC - College Office
412-237-3086