Solaris 10 in and on a Dell PowerEdge 850. Nagios 2.0(stable) and perfparse in and graphing. Monitoring 903 services on 111 hosts so far. By my calculations, we'll have over 2,000 services once we've migrated from the non-open-source monitoring, but that involves writing a job lot of plugins that won't be any use to anyone other than us. I guess I'm feeling good about it because I get few and far between blocks of time long enough to do stuff like this. I know there are plenty of installations which eclipse my effort by a long shot, but it's the win of moving away from expensive, clunky, closed monitoring to open-source, modifiable, agile monitoring that I was after really.
I'd also been wanting to get a look at Solaris 10 on x86 as I've read that there are a few large-scale installations that are going well so far. It was a tiny bit of a pain on the PE850, but that's because of a graphics driver problem and as it's a server I don't need a GUI anyway. I'm not even vaguely thinking that Solaris on commodity hardware by the truckload can compete in the same arena as Solaris on heavyweight Sun kit; that'd be like comparing apples with pears. But, given that Sun are behind x86 Solaris properly again I was interested to see how it would go. There's no way on earth I'd want to put it on a desktop machine (for various reasons I do believe that Windows and MacOS covers that more than well enough by comparison with Linux so Solaris on a desktop is a risible idea to me), but how does it fare on sufficiently vanilla x86 servers is a question that interests me. It's not a question that I'll get much of an answer from a single scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrel Dell, but it'll be the beginnings of one. Plus, servers like our monitoring server are the only ones we get to determine things like the OS with any certainty, there's no way any of our current clients will move to Solaris 10 on the kit we support for them because the live web front-end isn't there yet for a start and as for the telly stuff... that's all going RHEL anyway I think.
I guess I could do with revamping my Nagios documentation (yeah yeah I keep saying that), but given that it took ages to get the installation done (what with being a manager and all, I don't get a lot of geek time any more) I'm not so sure the documentation will be coming all that soon.
