EXPERIENCES CONVERTING TO AN OPEN SOURCE ENTERPRISE MONITORING SYSTEM

Session Speaker: Martin Harriss

Over the past few years, enterprise system monitoring has become a critical infrastructure component of Princeton University's Office of Information Technology (OIT) OIT recently performed a major upgrade of its enterprise monitoring system. A proprietary monitoring system was replaced by the open source Nagios system, as supplied, supported and enhanced by a third party software vendor. This talk will discuss the the rationale for the change, the process that ultimately selected the solution and the process of actually switching the monitoring from one system to another, which was done using somewhat limited staff resources. Finally, some comments will be made about the overall success of the project and outline some key points that should be considered by other organizations that are contemplating a similar project. We also outline some of the benefits that we believe will accrue from the new system, particularly with regard to the fact that we are now using an open source product for our enterprise monitoring.