Managing Huge Networks with Open Source Tools?

An anonymous reader asks: "I work for a large multinational firm with a network that spans the globe and am responsible for evaluating the software we use to monitor our network. Our department has a lot of money, and we're usually willing and able to spend it on good commercial software. Recently though, I find myself evaluating and approving more and more open source software. We are actually in the process of replacing some of our commercial tools with software like Nagios, LooperNG and syslog-ng. We are also evaluating MRTG, RRDTool, ntop and a host of other tools. The problem is that there's just too many of them, most of which are not maintained anymore. Here's my question: What other open-source tools do you use to monitor your networks? I not just looking for names, but how long you've been using them for, how easy / hard is it to administer and I guess how well it scales as the network grows. More importantly, are their respective projects still alive and kicking?"

Comments

Open Source Network Administration

[mcco7614]

I bought Open Source Network Administration by Kretchmar to answer this question. I was looking for open source tools to be used in a service provider environment and was unpleasantly surprised at what was revealed in this book. However, since it seems you're looking for enterprise-ish stuff, I highly recommend this.

You'll find many of the tools within to be quite useful during both day-to-day operations and troubleshooting as well as long term planning on your network. The author does a fairly decent job of walking you through a basic installation of each tool.

Slashdot reviewed it here.

Here are most of the tools discussed in this book.

Uhm

[neuroscr]

If you have the budget why not fund a project to make sure it doesn't stop being developed. This would make good use of that money and help everyone.

Re:Experience with Nagios

[dTb]

Did you look at OpenNMS?

Server Monitoring

[palmadj]

I've recently taken the position in a large multi-national company to monitor our devices as well. We are only about a year into it. We also use a mixture of OpenSouce and commercial tools. The thing I've noticed mostly with most software today is that they are becoming more and more a mix. For instance our main managment software is currently Netcool. Netcool is commercial but it utilizes Apache, Tomcat and alot of Perl/CGI. On the commercial side it uses Java, and thier own proprietary DB called Omnibus as well as a Sybase Communications protocal. The end result it is extremenly flexible and works across all platforms I've tried with little trouble. I really don't think the future of software will be as black and white as OpenSource vs Commercial. Its really going to be a mix of both. The benifit is lower costs to the customer because of less development effort for the vendor. I like Netcool alot because its very nature is to be as flexable as possible. Its possible to use Netcool for other puposes that the develpers never thought of. Our HP NNM system is good but is nowhere near as flexible simply because it can only go as far as HP wants it to go. Hence it is only used for network discovery and SMNP trap collection. Bottom line is that the best choice in software today is the software the includes some OpenSource code.

Our stuff includes

[harikiri]

We use the following tools:

• Nagios: For availability monitoring. When a service or host goes down, we know about it. Was put in place when we discovered one of our pairs of firewalls (hot standby) had silently failed over because of a faulty hdd, and we hadn't noticed it for 2 days.
• Cacti: For throughput and performance monitoring. Makes pretty little graphs. The best thing about it is that it helps bypass the complex configuration of rrdtool by using templates. Documentation on creating new, non-standard graphs could use some work.

Both tools give us a much better view of our network, and what our various devices are doing.

Address management

[Paul Carver]

What tools are popular for IP address management? Most of what I've seen is pretty basic. Are there any tools that are good at combining device inventory managment with address management and assigning addresses to new devices according to configurable rules?

For example, if I need to add 50 new web servers and each web server needs a redundant pair of NICs sharing one IP plus. Plus allowing multiple IPs per device or multiple devices per IP (e.g. VRRP, HSRP).

Spreadsheets seem faster than web based systems if it takes multiple queries to get all the info you need. A flexible query system and integration of address management with server monitoring seems like it would be very useful, but I haven't come found anything yet.