Looking for input

[lepermime.livejournal.com]

I'm looking for two things for my current company.
Right now we are pretty much fly by night for support. No trouble ticketing system or monitoring of our mission critical servers to speak of.

I've used Cacti and Nagios for monitoring in the past and both have their positive sides and negatives as well.

Cacti is fast easy to configure and I like it's layout but linking to it is somewhat of a pain in the butt when it comes to calling information from the "outside world." Nagios on the other hand is a real pain to set up, uses perl, but when it is up and running it's great. It's easily scalable and all that crap.

And now for the ticketing system.

I've used so many different ticket systems and CRM solutions I can no longer name them all. Some of the best I've seen were pretty much home brew hacked together solutions. Does anyone have a preferred product out there. Oh and about those linux zealots, yeah I work with em and it's gotta run on a linux server and be mostly unencumbered as far as licensing. I could slam something together with tkreq but that's just not pretty nor is it really adequate for what we'll need in the near future.

I don't wanna hemorage customers, as much as I hate em, they are my paycheck.

Comments

[wyrdrune.livejournal.com]

Have you considered BigBrother for monitoring? Although it's been taken over by Quest, and the "professional" licence isn't free, there is a free product which has an (I think) simple licence.

[taleya.livejournal.com]

we use a system we've developed ourselves. I've worked on a couple of large scale buisiness databases...and they're usually crap. As you said, home brew are the best. Plus you can actually add functionality without having to lube up your rectum.

For alerts, as much of a pain in the arse it is to set up, I'd go with Nagios. It's pretty easy for anyone to tell when shit's broken.

And I freely admit it, I love the 1930's AWOOGA car horn sound it makes when hosts go down :D

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

helpmeict (http://sourceforge.net/projects/helpmeict) is a functional trouble ticket system. Runs over PHP/Apache/Postgresql. Nice to configure via the web interface. There are a pile of similar offerings on Sourceforge if you do a search for "helpdesk", but helpmeict does do the biz.

I vote for Big Brother (http://www.bb4.org/features.html) as well. It is a pretty well-known monitoring tool which has the usual sort of features out of the box (including paging support) and a pile of plugins have been already developed. Free for non-commercial use.

Cricket (http://sourceforge.net/projects/cricket) is purely on the GPL, but I think would take a bit of tweaking, although lots of plugins have been made for that too (I've only used it as an end-user).

[kayfox.livejournal.com]

I use Bugzilla (http://www.bugzilla.org/) for most trouble tickets.

[japester.livejournal.com]

i've heard good things about RT (http://www.bestpractice.com/) (OSS)
jira and confluence (http://www.atlassian.com) (commercial)

these are from people at the sage-au conference this week, who use them and don't hate them.

[jecook]

I've used RT in the past. It was a pain in the bum for me to set it up, and it requires a 'decent' (read: not a frankenputer lying in the "disposal" pile) computer to run nicely, but it works pretty decent. the email side of it I never got to work right with our "runs on windows and it's mostly RFC compliant" mail server.

[kayfox.livejournal.com]

Better link for RT: http://www.bestpractical.com/rt/

[jecook]

I've used Request Tracker (RT, and see above comment) and IRM. IRM was pretty easy to install, although it had some unpolished edges on it. as far as a network monitor goes, I've never been in that position, so I can't help there.

As far as comercial:

I've used Remedy, and a few propriotary in house things. they were ok.

[zig-mover.livejournal.com]

I am struggling through making it easier to configure hosts in Nagios right now, and I hate it. It's the best I could find, though.