Network Monitor to Calculate downtime

seuss_ssues

Hoping someone on here can recommend something that will make my life easier.

Scenario:
We have a large WAN with remote offices connecting via hardware VPN.

I need a way to monitor those networks for downtime. I understand there are alot of network monitoring software, but i have been fruitless in finding what i need.

Features needed:
Log when a network goes down.
Log when it comes back up.
Calculate the downtime.

Example:
Network Down up total time down:
Network A 10:00 am 10:17 am 17 minutes.

I know someone on here has needed something to perform a similar function. There are just soooo many products out there for me to try and wade through to find what fits my needs.

seuss_ssues

Well ive had a few people recommend Nagios for remote network monitoring. Anyone have any experience with it?

RTmarc

SolarWinds

I get hit on the blackberry every time a specific nodes go down and then again when they come back up.

seuss_ssues

The getting notified when it goes down and comes back up isnt really a problem ( we have that in place already). I need something that will then calculate the downtime and log that.

Seems like such a simple problem....but its being a pain.

Its not been a high priority problem so i havent spent alot of time on it. Just seems like there has to be an easy way.

seuss_ssues

So im talking to myself.....im not crazy i swear.....


Anyway,

It looks like I may just write something to do what I need.

fping + perl should do the trick

---

fake, almost, sorta pseudo code

---

ping a list of IPs continually
if return indicates unreachable fork a child process
parent process continues to perform pings

child:
input a time stamp and which IP failed into sql server
ping the address till it returns rechable
put a time stamp into sql server
die

---

Anyone see any problems with that?

Ahriakin

I haven't had much time to play with it, just installed this morning, but you could give Hyperic a try. There's a pretty powerful open source/free version for download and so far it looks pretty damn good. I had Nagios ready to test today aswell but I haven't a clue about Linux, and I don't have time to learn a new OS for the sake of a monitoring tool. The fact Hyperic had a native windows install sold me on it as first test choice, and everything I've seen so far points to keeping it. I haven't gotten too deeply into the reporting tools but it looks like it can give historical availability reports which should help you with recording downtime.

http://www.hyperic.com/

seuss_ssues

One thing ive learned is that Nagios can be a chore to get installed. I actually sat down and got it all setup last friday or so. I havent taken the time since then to get the plugins and everything actually performing tasks and gathering data.

If you are unfamiliar with linux i would probably advise against trying to install it. There are several packages for it, as well as needing a web server with php support and setting up a mysql server. Then there is the task of tying it all together. Some of it is automated in the install files but alot has to be done by hand.

If you do decide I would recommend googling for a howto....ive got some links but they are at work.

srg

Where I work right now, we use Nagios to monitor almost every net that we manage.. so yeah, it works quite well. Haven't really played around alot with it myself, but the people in our NOC seems to like it :]. I think you should give it a try.

larkspur

we use What's Up Gold where I am at. We can get latency reports, dropped packets, etc, as well as site status messages.

there are too many features to list.

examsbynumbers

Cacti or SmokePing?

Ahriakin

Spent most of the afternoon on Hyperic again and I love this thing. It took a while to get it monitoring key processes but it's all coming together nicely. I really like that you can have it take actions based on alerts (whether that be resource usage or loss of availability etc.) that can be configured to do just about anything either by direct controls (eg. service stop/start) or batch files. It's very nice to have an app. that not only seems to do everything I want it to do but researching those functions leads to others I hadn't even though of needing/being feasible in a free app. 2 BIG thumbs up.