OMD - the Open Monitoring Distribution
      <http://omdistro.org/>


For installing Nagios you have a choice: compiling the neccessary packages from
source by yourself. Or you use the precompiled packages from your distribution.
Self compiling and installing means you have some manual work to do. If you will
use the packages from your distribution Nagios and other packages may not always
be up to date.

This is what OMD tries to solve: more current software releases but not all the
manual work of self compiling. And last but not least: you get the same
installation paths and directories on all plattforms. The plan is to release
more often than normal linux distribution do. We try to integrate vital patches
in order to close the gap between releasing the patch and including it in the
mainstream source.

What OMD contains
-----------------

OMD is no new Linux distribution. It is a collection of different software
packages round about Nagios:

  * nagios
  * NagVis
  * PNP4Nagios
  * rrdtool including rrdcached
  * nagios-plugins
  * Check_MK
  * Check_MK Multisite
  * MK Livestatus
  * dokuwiki
  * NSCA
  * check_nrpe
  * Thruk
  * check_oracle_health
  * check_mysql_health
  * check_multi
  * check_webinject
  * Shinken (still experimental)
  * MOD Gearman
  * jmx4perl
  * others...

Features
--------

* More than one instance per host

  OMD supports multiple but separated Nagios instances on the same machine,
  i.e. for one production usage and one test environment.

* Separate omd user per instance

  Each instance has its own user.

* Script based tarball building

  If you decide to compile omd for yourself, you get a single tarball with all
  neccessary paths and binaries. Installing this tarball on hosts is as simple
  as extracting a common tar file.

* Simple creation of new sites

  OMD create mysite create the site and omd start starts all stuff.

* Supporting different omd version at the same time

  You can install different versions in parallel, i.e. running your production
  instance with the last hard rock version and using the most current version
  in your test environment. There is an omd upgrade available, but at this time
  don't rely on it, it is experimental!

* Plattform independent paths

  OMD installs to /opt/omd on all plattforms. If you don't like this, you can
  symlink omd to every location you want.

Licensing
---------
OMD is available under the terms of the GNU General Public License of
version 2.  You find those terms in the file COPYING. Please note, that that
license only applies to OMD itself (its scripts, patches, configuration files,
etc.). The licenses of the packages it ships may differ. Please checkout
those packages for details on their licensing.

Further information
-------------------
Visit the OMD homepage at http://omdistro.org for online documentation,
new releases, information on the mailing lists, etc.

Some german documentation is available under http://mathias-kettner.de/omd.html.