What Do You Use for SNMP Monitoring? 103
linuxi386 wonders: "My company is in the process of implementing a global frame relay system. The network will cover 20+ states, and several European and Asian countries and Australia. It will have a 5 point full mesh fail-over with each coast/country having about 20 ppp links about 30 servers mixed between linux and windows plus a 2003 domain controller at each site. I have been looking for a really decent cheap web based monitoring application to maintain the entire system. So far I have looked at Solarwind's Orion and Adventnet's Opmanager. I like the look of Orion, but while I prefer the feature base of Opmanager, I cannot stand its pricing model or the XP playskool style theme it uses. I am trying to avoid writing my own system to manage this if at all possible. What would you folks recommend and why?"
Netreo (Score:1)
Cacti! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Cacti! (Score:5, Interesting)
Quite frankly, I found cacti's interface, abstractions, and terminology very difficult to grasp.
Munin, on the other hand, I've written a half dozen plugins for.
Admittedly, cacti is more powerful, but that didn't do me much good, as I couldn't for the life of me harness that power.
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Here I've got FreeBSD boxes with the ports of Nagios and Cacti running, very easy to get setup through ports. Cacti I admit has a learning curve, but the forums are fantastic. This post in particular is a good starting point http://forums.cacti.net/about15067.html [cacti.net]
If you are shy of trying to create your own scripts, just look for one that is similar and edit it. There is ex
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I'm now using it to monitor my lan/wan, and am setting up server monitoring next week. I found Cacti easy to install/manage, and I the managers of the various groups in the office like it, as they can
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I just set up CactiEZ from cactiusers.org to test out some stuff on my network. It's a basic distro built on CentOS 4 that installs just what you need, has most of the stuff pre-configured out of the box like the MySQL backend, the cron jobs, etc... and is just generally EASY to use.
Personally, I'm running it in a VMWare machine without seeing a very big performance hit on the Win2k3 server it's hoste
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You can write your own scripts to poll items via the command line or SNMP, and then create your graph templates to draw the graphs the way you want.
One of the best features about Cacti is that you can create tem
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Google it!!!! (Score:5, Funny)
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Shhhhhh, you wouldn't want Google to send you a warning letter [slashdot.org], would you?
What we use (Score:5, Informative)
At the companies I've worked at, we have typically started with the free monitoring software package Nagios and after a shortperiod of time, purchased the commercial product NetCool. NetCool is everything you could ever ask for... assuming you have a few months to tweak the rules to set the event levels correctly... But I guess all monitoring systems are like that.
Depending on the size of your NOC, your datacenter, and your client base, I would recommend starting with Nagios and, if it proves to be too small for your needs, move the NetCool. (Just be prepared to pay serious $$$ for NetCool)
HTH
A.Coward
Re:What we use (Score:5, Informative)
Plus when you start using it, you find your self adding new scripts to monitor more and more because its that easy. I'm using it to monitor tcp/udp ports, processes, oracle rac instanaces, oracle queues, swiftmq queues, hardware nics, hardware stats, memory/cpu/etc, log sizes, etc.
So, not sure why I'd buy Netcool when Nagios is free, and works great. The time you spend configuring Nagios is cheap and easy. And it works with netexpert too.
I like having a nice dashboard for my NOC, so they can keep a good eye on the health of a service, without lots of training.
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Considering that your time is not free, I think you've answered your own question. I love open source, but in most project where I have been involved where the choice between open source (as in at no cost) and closed software (as in, pay up) the difference in TCO is often minimal. I think people should stop using license costs as a way to promote ope
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On a personal level, there are a number of times where I would much rather spend the extra couple hundred bucks to get someone else to do the work for me... spending $50 bucks to get H&R Block to do my taxes is a really good example of this.
On a business level, your time, or the time of the company's employees, is a resource. If you really have nothing better to do than write custom scripts for an open source application, then that's fine. But as a manager-type, would I rather pay you $30/hr over a cou
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Don't get me wrong, I'm a HUGE Open Source proponent. I've been using Linux since 98. Started with RedHat, quickly ditched that in favour of Slackware, and only recently moved to KUbuntu. I've also made scripts to do automatic polling and webpage generation using MRTG.
People with the ability and time should *definitely* go for open source, as it's the best compromise between rolling your own and buying proprietary. Not everyone is lucky enough to work in a position where their job is basically feast-or-fam
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Nevertheless, the feature list check should be a first look, that is a given. For example, the OP gave the impressio
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I *heart* Nagios (and MRTG, which I use for even more)
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I guess:
Nagios is targeted at companies up to the medium-sized ISP level. It misses functionality for the real big networks. What we miss is proper SNMP trap handling (you can hack it so it works more or less, but not scalable or extremely reliable), integration with proprietary management systems (such as Cisco WAN manager, Alcatel AWS etc. ad infinitum), and scalability to 10.000's of devices (yes you can distribute your sensors, but it's n
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my experiences with netcool-ISM at two different companies have been unpleasant. their software crashed the probe hosts (running linux) at least once a week, their support department is horrendous, and it is a pita to administrate.
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Either go big or go home (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Either go big or go home (Score:5, Interesting)
It is one of the best fault oriented NMSes on the market, but its performance monitoring side has always sucked bricks through thing straw sideways. Based on the packages mentioned in the original post the poster is trying to monitor performance and utilisation, not faults so Openview is the wrong tool.
I am an old school person (been doing this for 10+ years now on networks from 10 nodes to global telco), so my first choice for performance monitoring in a 30 node setup would be the classic - MRTG (though I use it with a rrd backend nowdays). I have run it for up to 600 monitored variables. It works. For a 30 node full mesh this will be a no-brainer. Its main disadvantage is that it does not preserve long term historical data (which managers sometimes require). The main advantage is that you can also plug in non-network data (CPU, environmental, application performance) from the linux part with ease. The next choice would obviously be infovista (its original stuff, not the stuff it acquired recently). It costs money though. No idea how much nowdays. It also has a learning curve associated with it.
As far as the utilities mentioned in the original post - they are winhoze stuff, so I am not very familiar with them. I have seen some other products under the same brands (solarwind tftp server) and they are laughable.
MRTG and historical data (Score:1)
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Usually (micro)managers and capacity (pseudo)planners want to be able to do adhoc-like queries which cannot be satisfied easily by such data. One solution is to do an immediate run after the MRTG run and put the "current" variable values into a database. You basically use MRTG for short-term graphing and as a collector. From there on you can use the data at a later date for ad-hoc stuff.
Unfortunately if you want to reproduce MRTG itself from th
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Assuming you're not an idiot, some combination of Nagios, Cacti, net-snmp, logwatch, syslog-ng, your favorite scripting language is cheaper to isntall, run, and maintain. Yeah you have to put a guy on it at least part time, but at least you don't have to put a full time guy on it li
Define Cheap (Score:1, Redundant)
OpenView (Score:1)
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Check out Nagios (Score:5, Informative)
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Like the function, dislike the look? (Score:3, Interesting)
So go with the tool that works best, looks are pretty easy to adjust, as long as usability is there to begin with... if it's clunky, confusing and you hate how it looks... well that would take a bigger commitment to fix than just looks but it's been done before. Example... I once completely redesigned the UI for Bugzilla, canned queries, new workflows, collapsing panes, calendar widgets, color coding and more... but it was worth it in the end and that company still uses it 90% the way I left it. Which means it wasn't wasted effort.
Well, think about it anyways.
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That said, maybe you can make UI changes a condition of your purchase? You could also leverage the fact that you're using the tool to do "all this" as a reason to get more favorable licensing terms & pricing from the seller. If you're implementing a system as large as you say, I have to imagine tha
We've tried lots (Score:2)
OpsManager has some real nice features which made it easy to display and group results, especially to non-engineering people (good graphing tools built in, etc), but we found it didn't perform as well as the other 2. Addtionally, you have to pay for it.
Cacti was nice because of the built in hooks for apache and MySql, but it didn't have some features we wanted (auto host discovery, certain data summarization)
We use Ganglia
Correlation, your best asset (Score:3, Interesting)
(I'm not affiliated with these companies or products)
Use a Proper Tool (Score:5, Insightful)
Something like HP OpenView does the job. Cisco have a sw tool but not as good, as do Sunand IBM. CA Unicentre is overkill and too expensive to my mind. For small jobs (less than 100 nodes) I've used Ipswitch Whatsup Professional. You want something that goes inside your switches and has agents for all your servers if you want to monitor properly.
In the dim past (10+yrs ago) I used Scotty (a Tcl/Tk freeware tool) and at other times wrote my own in Python/TK with Perl daemons/services.
net-snmp on sourceforge has tools you can use but to my mind these days, again I'd say - it's an expensive (and I presume important) network your've got there, so spend some money to monitor it properly. The expensive tools ($30k+) all have ready made agents or know about a huge variety of hw so you don't have to customise MIBs and code (though Unicentre takes a lot of customisation to work well and they all need customisation of sorts). It might take you 3 months to do a half decent job coding yourself that a commercial package could do with more features in a few weeks and you've got support and someone to complain to if there're problems. How much money would be lost when the network goes down in those three months? Just one hour for a large corporation would cover the cost of the sw.
I do agree it's great fun rolling your own (I'm sure you're a great programmer) if you have the time and the corporate managers don't appreciate the need to monitor things properly and you can't convince them to spend the dollars - but when it goes down it'll be your arse and the managers'/company's money being lost while you sweat to fix things - they'll quickly tell you then (and rightly so) it would have been worth doing it right the first time (you didn't think they'd take the heat for this now did you?) no matter how good your code will look in just another months time.
At worst write some emails as evidence that you requested such and such a package with official quotes and have their replies on record they refused to spend the money on it. I know of one company that went to the wall when the network went down (chain of retail stores) and a series of seemingly small faults on critical days (like the last shopping days before christmas) meant the company went under and the IT consultants who designed the system took the blame in court in the end - cost them $30m (plus a few hundred ppl lost jobs).
Now if this is just some academic network or it's not your responsibility then fine (mind you many research places are even more fussy about their networks than corporate users).
Unfortunately there are times when jumping into coding, nomatter how well intentioned, isn't the most pragmatic or best solution.
Who needs SNMP? (Score:5, Funny)
At work we rely on th much more robust, and easy to use URMP ("User Resource Management Protocal") to monitor our systems. When the systems go down, the users let us know about it.
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Intellipool Network Monitor. (Score:1)
Oblig (Score:1)
It is trivial to write up simple net-snmp based pollers to push into RRDTool for graphing (my preferred method for generating traffic stats, after polling for which interfaces are administratively and operationally up, saves on having to configure what interfaces to monitor as you do with MRTG). Same data can also be pushed into whatever you use for historical logs.
If
SNMP Monitoring (Score:2)
Although a PITA to set up, Netdisco http://www.netdisco.org/ [netdisco.org] is a pretty awesome Open Source solution.
strike
SNMP network monitoring (Score:1)
Ubersmith! (Score:2)
What the hell? (Score:3, Interesting)
Get yourself together and look for a GOOD system. If you're already spending TONS of money, you might aswell spend some more to get exactly what you want, instead of settling for something. It might turn out that a free system is the best system for you, but please, good HAS GOT TO come before cheap!
Anyone try out Hyperic? (Score:1)
Zabbix (Score:2)
science logic - em7 (Score:1)
We have an EM7 appliance. We're currently monitoring aprox 100 devices. 80 are servers, the rest network devices.
InterMapper (Score:3, Informative)
Blatant plug - but you asked for it :) (Score:2)
> The network will cover 20+ states, and several European and Asian countries and Australia.
* Our system allows for "satellites" which are remote monitoring stations allowing you to perform checks against a given node from several remote locations.
* Our system works well even in NAT'ed setups where several remote private-network sites report in status info to a central monitoring server
* You can even delegate administrative tasks, so that the asian administ
MRTG (Score:1)
Oldie but a goodie.
-d
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Simple and Elegant: MON (Score:4, Informative)
Groundwork Monitor Professional (Score:2, Informative)
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Supporting SETS, the WMI-OS version allows you to remotely: * query service state * start/stop/pause services * remotely execute programs * shutdown/restart servers
Frame relay??? Are you high? (Score:2)
kashani
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Somix WebNM (Score:1)
I can monitor and alert on ANYTHING I want with this this package. If I have questions, the support is AWESOME.
I used to use a lot of free tools like but the administration was time consuming (see MRTG).
got history? (Score:1)
For data collection and graphing, I've found cricket ( link [sourceforge.net]) to be very good. Once you've learned it, you can easily add new snmp OIDs into monitoring. In my experience that's been important because there are often new, som
The best that i've seen (Score:1)
I have lots of experience in a NOC (Score:1)
The best solution we have found so far? Product called SysOrb. http://www.evalesco.com/ [evalesco.com] . The price is unbeatable for the feature set.
And it blows What's Up (Crap) Professional out of the water.
You can use SNMP queries on devices, install Agents on servers to be monitored, and even run simple Netchecks like seeing if there is an httpd responding on port 80, or even
try Hyperic (Score:1)
Hyperic has a enterprise and a community edition, so you can try out and decide if you need enterprise support and features.
http://www.hyperic.com/ [hyperic.com]
Argus (Score:1)
The Good Old Stand Bys (Score:2)
IBM's Tivoli is something to look at
BMC's Patrol
HP's Openview
NetIQ (which I hated)
Nortel's Optivity
Sun's Solstice
CA's Unicenter
Any one of the those ought to be able to do anything and everything you're asking for. Out of that list, I personally prefer BMC, but that's me.
2 cents,
QueenB
OpManager (Score:2)
OpManager is fully capable of what you're looking for, I think you should give it another look despite your feelings abo
SNMP monitoring (Score:1)
Since you're installing frame relay, I assume that you're using hardware from the Evil Empire (Cisco), so CiscoWorks is a perfectly adequate SNMP element manager for the Cisco hardware. However, if you're interested in more than just monitoring your
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A bit off topic, but I'm curious what your preferred alternative(s) would be?
Not arguing with the Evil Empire viewpoint at all, just interested in what you prefer to work with.
Big Brother (Score:1)
- The free version works great
- It can be Linux/Unix based (would recommend) or run from Windows
- It gives a simple view of all network connected devices either on 1 or several pages, depending how you configure it
- Can utilise paging / alert acknowleging etc.
- There are many external scripts available at http://www.deadcat.net/ [deadcat.net] for specialised checking
- It is easy enough to write your own external scripts if you know the basics of shell scripting
- It i
CITTIO WatchTower (Score:1)
SNMP Monitoring (Score:1)
www.snmp.com for product information and technical discussion of your requirements.