Network Monitoring

NightShade03

Hey what software does everyone use for network monitoring? Do you guys/gals monitor your network at all? (Monitoring can either be management like Nagios or MOM or from a security standpoint IDS/IPS).

dynamik

I'm sure you'll get some new responses since this thread is old, but I asked a similar question awhile ago: http://www.techexams.net/forums/off-topic/32471-suggestions-software-monitor-computers-net-devs.html

arwes

Not using anything really seriously at the moment but I've played with Opsview (fancy Nagios all in one thing) and more recently I've installed Groundwork Open Source. Haven't really had time to get serious with it. Nagios can do some really cool stuff though. I found a script someone wrote to make it use Asterisk (PBX software) to dial out for notifications. The TTS thing would ask for a response, and you could either accept the notification or pass it on to the next technician down the line. Very sharp.

qwertyiop

I use Nagios, its tough to setup but i like what it offers.

NightShade03

Thanks for the older reference dynamik. I would hope that there are slightly more options out now or people have at least used / tested some different systems from last time. I have to say I completely didn't think to ask how many clients / switches / etc people have. Guess that would have a big affect on software choice.

I have to say I use Nagios and I love it. It took me three days to sit down and read through all the documentation and test my custom made scripts before i even started configuring any clients but now....wow its very sweet. I have mapped layouts (down to the room of each building) of what client is where, failover, graphing for management reports, notification, and more. Might I add I monitor over 700 devices on my network.

UnixGeek

The two that I would look at are Xymon and Nagios. If you don't mind investing some time into setting everything up, check out Nagios. Otherwise, for something that's quick and easy to setup and customize, Xymon is hard to beat.

rsutton

Running Cacti for Servers/network. Open source and a pain to setup but I'm happy with the end result.

Forsaken_GA

Cacti's not really for monitoring, it's more of a graphing visualization thing.

My holy trinity is Nagios, Cacti, and Rancid. Can't live without the three of them.

msteinhilber

I've tried many (various Nagios and/or Cacti implementations, Zenoss, more I am forgetting), but the one I found easiest to setup and jump right into was Zabbix:

Homepage of ZABBIX :: An Enterprise-Class Open Source Distributed Monitoring Solution

In my environment (very small crew, lots of sites and users) I didn't have time to really devote to learning something such as Nagios or time to set it up so this worked well. I have a box running it that monitors ~300 servers/various important workstations, about 550 SNMP devices monitored, over 180,000 items (port utilization, hdd usage, mem usage, e-mail queues, etc), about 50 screens of various graph layouts, and over 2,500 graphs that are updated. Most of the networking gear polls at 60 second intervals while the servers/workstations poll at 5 minutes for the majority of the items monitored. The box is fairly basic desktop class hardware consisting of a quad-core core2, 8gb ram, 80gb mirror for the OS, and 3 500gb drives in raid5 for the data collected (should be able to save about 2 years of data in theory, so far so good) on CentOS using software raid. Holds up to the load just fine for what it does. When I had a Zenoss box doing similar (it was also easy to setup), it did not work very well on the same platform with at least half of the items monitored.

rsutton

I use Cacti to monitor about 35 servers, 20 switches/routers and UPS. I'm not sure why anyone would say Cacti is not a monitoring application. I get an email alert when any of my devices has a problem including network problem, disk problem, CPU/memory spike aka threshholds passed etc.

shednik

WhatsUp Gold, Cacti, Vital Suite, & MRTG.

Lizano

If you have HP products, you can use HP Systems Insight Manager, it's freeware and if you have a Service Agreement with HP it can automatically open a Case with HP for you.