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.

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.