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Network Monitoring Tools For Unix?

Posted by Cliff on from the watching-the-ether dept.

drexle asks: "I work for a city government supporting the various WAN's and LAN's used throughout the city by the police, fire department, etc. Currently, we are using an application on a HP-UX system on its last legs to monitor the status of the various routers, switches, etc., throughout the city, and basically just pages someone if something goes really wrong. Are there any good tools to do this available for a Linux/*BSD platform? Preferably with some sort of GUI which can display an organizational map of the network? Most of the routers/switches are from Cisco, w/ various other equipment used for the WAN connections(microwave, T1's, ...) "

5 of 13 comments (clear)

  1. Check out OpenNMS by Jesse+Becker · · Score: 2

    Have a look at the OpenNMS project. It looks to be very close to what you are looking for. I recently heard Steve Giles, one of their lead technical people, give a presentation at the local LUG meeting, and I was quite impressed.

  2. Network Monitoring on Linux I have done.. by ReD-MaN · · Score: 2

    I have used both GxSnmp (http://www.gxsnmp.org) and Computer Associates Unicentre TNG (http://www.cai.com) Framework on Linux for Monitoring client networks.

    Unicentre is much easier to setup then GXSNMP, but either one is good.

    I also added on to them a package called Telalert to do paging etc, when nodes go down. (http://www.telamon.com)

    --
    If Microsoft was never created, who would we have to hate?
  3. Big Brother by GW+Hayduke · · Score: 2

    I use both MRTG and Big Brother for different situations and circumstances... Big Brother is pretty easy to setup and it's pages (Both Web and pager/email/call-you-in-the-middle-of-the-night-an d-piss-off-your-wife functions work almost too well :) ) MRTG has it beat hands down though as far as reporting graphs of utilization though

    --
    -- Life: Hate the Game... Love the cereal
  4. NetSaint - Free, easy to use, and powerful by tmoyer · · Score: 3

    http://www.netsaint.org

    I just set up NetSaint this morning to monitor some servers, and I am really impressed with it. It took me less than 2 hours to set up to monitor an entire network, and that included reading the (very good) documentation.

    You can monitor ping results, system loads, disk space, users, zombine processes, HTTP, PostgreSQL, etc. etc. etc. on Linux/other UNIX boxes, Windows boxes, and printers. The results can be viewed from the command line, or through CGI scripts. The CGI scripts show network status maps (all your servers at once) and can even show them using VRML! This thing is awesome! Alerts can be sent via e-mail or pagers.

    There's also an article about setting up NetSaint in Byte:

    http://www.byte.com/column/BYT19990728S0008

  5. List of the best... by Mr_Person · · Score: 2

    Check out this website. It has a list of ~20 apps that will do what you want. While you're at it, check out the rest of the site, it has some pretty neat network utilities.