Muhammad Qadir; Muhammad Adnan MCS-2010-37, pp. 88. COM/School of Computing, 2010.
Context: Extensive and rapid continuous growth in Internet Protocol (IP) based networks
and as the result of increasing dependencies on these networks makes them extremely
challenging to manage and keep them running all the time. 24/7 non-stop monitoring is
important to minimize the down time of the network. For this reason dependency on
automated network monitoring has been increased.
Objectives: There are many tools and systems available for network monitoring. This
includes expensive commercial solutions to open source products. Nagios and OpenNMS are
two of the most popular systems and they are considered to be close competitors.
Comparison discussions about them are very common at different forums on internet. But no
empirical study for comparison analysis has been done. In this thesis the comparison study
between Nagios and OpenNMS was conducted.
Methods: Network monitoring functionalities are listed down from literature followed by
industrial interviews with the networking professionals. Then taking these functionalities as
a base, to evaluate, survey studies for both systems were conducted separately and
comparison analysis of the results was performed. Usability evaluation of both systems was
done by conducting usability testing and comparison analysis of the results was performed.
Results: Besides providing the comparison of both systems this study also can help to findout
the strengths and weaknesses of both systems separately. And in the end we suggested a
list of functionalities and features which might help in selection of a monitoring system and
also might be helpful for improvement of the monitoring systems.