What Do You Use for SNMP Monitoring?

linuxi386 wonders: "My company is in the process of implementing a global frame relay system. The network will cover 20+ states, and several European and Asian countries and Australia. It will have a 5 point full mesh fail-over with each coast/country having about 20 ppp links about 30 servers mixed between linux and windows plus a 2003 domain controller at each site. I have been looking for a really decent cheap web based monitoring application to maintain the entire system. So far I have looked at Solarwind's Orion and Adventnet's Opmanager. I like the look of Orion, but while I prefer the feature base of Opmanager, I cannot stand its pricing model or the XP playskool style theme it uses. I am trying to avoid writing my own system to manage this if at all possible. What would you folks recommend and why?"

Comments

Cacti!

[sampowers]

We have a medium sized setup and for us, Cacti works great. http://www.cacti.net/

Re:Cacti!

[lanner]

I use Cacti too, both for personal use as well as at the workplace. We monitor Cisco routers, Linux systems, Windows systems, Network Appliance Storage Filers, Cisco PIX firewalls, and a few other miscellaneous things. At a previous employer of mine, we had about 200 different devices being polled.

You can write your own scripts to poll items via the command line or SNMP, and then create your graph templates to draw the graphs the way you want.

One of the best features about Cacti is that you can create templates for graphs and data sources, and export them for others to use.

Cacti still needs some work, but it's a pretty good product for free. Releases in the last year has been slow, but I think that is because of a development efforts to a major future version change.

Other tools that I have heard about are jffnms and zabbix, though I have used neither.

What we use

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm posting as an AC so I don't break any I.P. and/or NDA's.

At the companies I've worked at, we have typically started with the free monitoring software package Nagios and after a shortperiod of time, purchased the commercial product NetCool. NetCool is everything you could ever ask for... assuming you have a few months to tweak the rules to set the event levels correctly... But I guess all monitoring systems are like that.

Depending on the size of your NOC, your datacenter, and your client base, I would recommend starting with Nagios and, if it proves to be too small for your needs, move the NetCool. (Just be prepared to pay serious $$$ for NetCool)

HTH

A.Coward

Re:What we use

[BrookHarty]

Yup, Nagios is great, and you can customize it to work on anything. I dont see a reason to buy an expensive professional enterprise solution when Nagios is an enterprise solution.

Plus when you start using it, you find your self adding new scripts to monitor more and more because its that easy. I'm using it to monitor tcp/udp ports, processes, oracle rac instanaces, oracle queues, swiftmq queues, hardware nics, hardware stats, memory/cpu/etc, log sizes, etc.

So, not sure why I'd buy Netcool when Nagios is free, and works great. The time you spend configuring Nagios is cheap and easy. And it works with netexpert too.

I like having a nice dashboard for my NOC, so they can keep a good eye on the health of a service, without lots of training.

Re:What we use

[macdaddy]

The problem is you can't extend NetCool or the other closed source apps to anything other than what they've allowed you to monitor. I'm monitoring the state of BGP peering sessions with Nagios. Try doing that with NetCool. Sometimes you don't get what you pay for. Sometimes you have to use a little of your own ingenuity.

Check out Nagios

[ErikTheRed]

Nagios is a fairly easy-to-learn, extremely extensible (can you use a scripting language?) monitoring system. It scales reasonably well, distributed stat gathering, can respond to SNMP traps, etc. Not the easiest out of the box (you'll spend a day or two learning to use it and set it up), but there's very little you can't make it do.

Re:Check out Nagios

[nuintari]

I have to second this, nagios is amazing for network monitoring. You can actively poll for availability, build a complex dependency tree based on your network's actual layout. It scales very well, you can have the main web interface server in a good central spot, and have servers that do the actual checking and report back littered throughout your network. It can handle snmp traps with the addition of net-snmp, you can write your own checks and plugins, customize notifications. It is really an amazing framework.

Grab the no starch press book on nagios, it has examples of how to do everything I just said, and much more.

InterMapper

[sam1am]

I'm a fan of InterMapper, powerful but not overly complicated, and easily extensible. It also runs on MacOSX, Windows, Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD. It was originally developed at Dartmouth College to support their network, and has been marketed commercially since 1996.

Simple and Elegant: MON

[rasjani]

http://www.kernel.org/software/mon/ I was one of the implementation crew for small noc (about 7 people incl. managers) and approx 150 machines in various locations.. I reviewed quite a lot of free software and while most of them where looking quite nice (nagios/bigbrother/etc.), allmost all of them where filled with features that where really not essential just for "monitor the healt of the system" so i ended up with mon. Mon, for me was really the "unix way" of creating stuff, make things easy/simple and extend it with other tools.. The generic layout we used was net-snmp on client hosts either being polled in intervals or sending traps to the main machines.

Groundwork Monitor Professional

[_termx23]

For a network like yours, you do not want to "do it yourself" with Nagios. Nagios is the best network monitoring package available, but unless you have a full-time system admin dedicated to it, you will be in a world of pain. A better plan would be to look at Groundwork Monitor Professional (www.groundworkopensource.com). The core of GMP is Nagios, but Groundwork have added plenty of integration goodness (profiles of service checks for particular servers: got an Exchange box but don't know which services to monitor; no problem, just use the Exchange profile containing all of the important service checks for Exchange). Full GUI configuration, SNMP traps, graphing, the whole shebang. US$16,000 a year for unlimited devices plus support. Get Sheila at Groundwork to walk you through a Webex presentation and download Rich Trezza's VMware appliance from http://richard.trezza.us/vmach/index.html
The VM only contains the basic open source functionality, but it still kicks any available Nagios configuration package.