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

Re:Cacti!

[merreborn]

I've found Munin much easier to configure and extend than cacti.

Quite frankly, I found cacti's interface, abstractions, and terminology very difficult to grasp.

Munin, on the other hand, I've written a half dozen plugins for.

Admittedly, cacti is more powerful, but that didn't do me much good, as I couldn't for the life of me harness that power.

Like the function, dislike the look?

[foniksonik]

Is a 'theme' really going to turn you off a piece of software? Ask the company if you can have it re-branded. Many companies will do this for free, especially web-based tools... and if they don't, well it's web based... there are stylesheets, graphics and html, it really shouldn't be that hard to make some radical visual changes without too much work.

So go with the tool that works best, looks are pretty easy to adjust, as long as usability is there to begin with... if it's clunky, confusing and you hate how it looks... well that would take a bigger commitment to fix than just looks but it's been done before. Example... I once completely redesigned the UI for Bugzilla, canned queries, new workflows, collapsing panes, calendar widgets, color coding and more... but it was worth it in the end and that company still uses it 90% the way I left it. Which means it wasn't wasted effort.

Well, think about it anyways.

Re:Like the function, dislike the look?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got to agree with this -- form should follow function. If the features are the best, but the "look" isn't so great, that's still better than a great looking app which doesn't do what you want it to.

That said, maybe you can make UI changes a condition of your purchase? You could also leverage the fact that you're using the tool to do "all this" as a reason to get more favorable licensing terms & pricing from the seller. If you're implementing a system as large as you say, I have to imagine that your company must have *some* clout when it comes to negotiating the licensing.

Re:Either go big or go home

[arivanov]

Openview is not necessarily the answer.

It is one of the best fault oriented NMSes on the market, but its performance monitoring side has always sucked bricks through thing straw sideways. Based on the packages mentioned in the original post the poster is trying to monitor performance and utilisation, not faults so Openview is the wrong tool.

I am an old school person (been doing this for 10+ years now on networks from 10 nodes to global telco), so my first choice for performance monitoring in a 30 node setup would be the classic - MRTG (though I use it with a rrd backend nowdays). I have run it for up to 600 monitored variables. It works. For a 30 node full mesh this will be a no-brainer. Its main disadvantage is that it does not preserve long term historical data (which managers sometimes require). The main advantage is that you can also plug in non-network data (CPU, environmental, application performance) from the linux part with ease. The next choice would obviously be infovista (its original stuff, not the stuff it acquired recently). It costs money though. No idea how much nowdays. It also has a learning curve associated with it.

As far as the utilities mentioned in the original post - they are winhoze stuff, so I am not very familiar with them. I have seen some other products under the same brands (solarwind tftp server) and they are laughable.

Correlation, your best asset

[spinash]

if your network has a certain size and you do everything by SNMP, you need to be able to correlate the events to avoid alarm floods when one link goes down. We have used Openservice's Nervecenter with great success, coupled with NetCool from IBM. The pricing is steep, but the products are top-notch. In our configuration, we monitor about 8'000 network devices (Cisco, 3com, Bay, Nokia-IPSO, Consentry, etc) using 2 Nervecenter running on 2 Sun 480 boxes.

(I'm not affiliated with these companies or products)

What the hell?

[jevring]

So, let me get this straight, you're building a GLOBAL frame relay system, with nodes in 20+ states, with massive redundancy, and you're looking for a CHEAP system?

Get yourself together and look for a GOOD system. If you're already spending TONS of money, you might aswell spend some more to get exactly what you want, instead of settling for something. It might turn out that a free system is the best system for you, but please, good HAS GOT TO come before cheap!

Re:Cacti!

[cowwie]

Crap... that was me and I'm too stupid to login. Let me post again so it doesn't get filtered out.
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I just set up CactiEZ from cactiusers.org to test out some stuff on my network. It's a basic distro built on CentOS 4 that installs just what you need, has most of the stuff pre-configured out of the box like the MySQL backend, the cron jobs, etc... and is just generally EASY to use.

Personally, I'm running it in a VMWare machine without seeing a very big performance hit on the Win2k3 server it's hosted on. Then again, I'm only using it to monitor a handfull of firewalls, routers, and UPSes.

Either way, don't let Cacti's complexity scare you off.... the CactiEZ distro is incredibly quick to get setup and going.

Re:Cacti!

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't seen Munin myself, but I'll go check it out cause I'm in the middle of configuring various monitoring myself.
 
Here I've got FreeBSD boxes with the ports of Nagios and Cacti running, very easy to get setup through ports. Cacti I admit has a learning curve, but the forums are fantastic. This post in particular is a good starting point http://forums.cacti.net/about15067.html
 
If you are shy of trying to create your own scripts, just look for one that is similar and edit it. There is example code in the forums for creating a perl script to query the Nagios Windows client from a *nix box for perfmon counters, that works fantastic for me - I look up various troubleshooting tools, figure out what perfmon counters they check and write a script to graph that myself, did that for our Exchange boxes by using some of the same perfmon counters that the Exchange Troubleshooting tool from MS does. Once you edit templates and scripts a few times from the forums, you'll be able to create ones from scratch a lot easier.
 
Also in Cacti the generic SNMP template is great if you can figure out what OID you want to graph, helps to have some experience with MIB's or snmpwalk though.
 
One more thing is that I have in the past worked with some high end cost a lot of bucks monitoring systems, including the Solar winds toolsets and I am using Cacti/Nagios not because they are free, but that I think they are better and considerably more flexible, maybe they don't look as pretty, but they get the job done.