Network Monitoring Tool

boostinbadger

Is there a way to create a monitoring tool with Visio, etc that would let you know whether a device is down? We use Ipswitch's WhatsUp here at work, but I was thinking of designing one of my own.

cacharo

I've seen some really crazy things done with Visio. That being said, I am not a Visio guru and have no idea where someone would start in the development of a tool like that. This isn't much of a post I know, but since you have 0 replies its better than nothing.

boostinbadger

I thought I read that it can be done in previous versions of Visio, so if that is true I would assume 2007 would do it. I am also playing with Network Notepad, but haven't gotten deep enough into it to see if it can do it.

Mishra

Some monitoring programs will let you import a visio diagram and edit icons and such until you get your desired configuration.

I really thought WhatsUp did that but its been a while since I worked in a NOC.

dredlord

You should try HP's network node manager NNM its a tool to plot network devices and brings up SNMP alerts once a trap has been sent.

hypnotoad

Cacti with "Weathermapping" is free and is widely-used. Lots of people use Nagios too.

In the non-free world, Solarwinds makes a product called Orion that is designed for this very thing. I prefer Paessler PRTG myself.

boostinbadger

I like the looks of Cacti. I will have to do some reading into it though. Nagios looks good too, but I do not use Linux.

Luckycharms

Before deciding on a product you need to figure out how your are going to monitor and what you are going to monitor... ICMP,SNMP,Netflow,etc... Switch/Routers..Mail Servers... And then figure out how robust your response needs to be...

Figure these things out first before looking at the gui of a product... You will thank me later..

Ahriakin

Hyperic is a very good (free) Windows option, probably the only open source choice that has a Win32 server (with optional Linux servers, Linux/Win32/Mac etc. Agents). The only thing I don't like about it, and part of the reason I'm working on moving to Nagios, is the free version does not let you use templates for your devices. While it auto-detects and starts reporting on a lot of services straight away when you want to get more granular alerting and service monitoring you have to configure them individually for each device/server, with Nagios you can use templates and deploy extra alerts etc. very quickly. On the otherhand Hyperic is very easy to setup with a short learning curve at least to get the basics going, Nagios will take longer but once you have it up and running it is more scaleable imho. If you do go with Nagios I highly recommend this book, I'm about halfway through it now and it has been invaluable, http://apress.com/book/view/1590596099 .

boostinbadger

I would like to monitor servers, managed switches, routers, and waps. This will all be done with ICMP.

A simple up/down notification is what I am after, like red for down and green for up. I want it to perform like WhatsUp.

JDMurray

I remember Visio 2000 or 2002 having a network auto-discovery feature that was removed in a later release. (I have no idea why.) Visio does have the VBA scripting engine, so it should be possible to write a network auto-discovery program that could communicate it's finding to Visio via a COM interface connection, allowing Visio to auto-render a self-updating network topology map. I'd be surprised if there isn't already a project or two like that at www.sourceforge.net. If not, it'd sure be a cool project to do.

astorrs

JDMurray wrote:

I remember Visio 2000 or 2002 having a network auto-discovery feature that was removed in a later release. (I have no idea why.) Visio does have the VBA scripting engine, so it should be possible to write a network auto-discovery program that could communicate it's finding to Visio via a COM interface connection, allowing Visio to auto-render a self-updating network topology map. I'd be surprised if there isn't already a project or two like that at www.sourceforge.net. If not, it'd sure be a cool project to do.

LANSurveyor Express is free until the end of the month and it outputs to Visio 2007:

http://www.solarwinds.com/register/index.aspx?Program=583&c=70150000000DWUM&CMP=LEC-Visio-Toolbox-HP-LSE-DL