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.

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.