Monitoring Tools

George Bonser gbonser at seven.com
Thu Aug 19 16:04:13 UTC 2010



> -----Original Message-----
> From: jacob miller 
> Sent: Thursday, August 19, 2010 4:36 AM
> To: nanog at nanog.org
> Subject: Re: Monitoring Tools
> 
> Phil,
> 
> Am looking for availability reports,bandwidth usage,alerting service
> and ability to create different logins to users so they can access
diff
> objects
> 
> Thnks,

Jacob,

I have not yet found a monitoring environment to my liking and I have
seen most of them over the years.  That is a project that could keep
someone busy for a decade or so (and is one of the things I might work
on when I retire).  It seems that the more configurable they are, the
less intuitive they are and more difficult to get configured properly.
Many of the open source tools have only one or two active developers who
also have lives outside the project and dealing with a flood of feature
requests from the field can be more than they can reasonably
accommodate. The commercial monitoring environments can be extremely
expensive and very difficult to configure.  More important than
configuring them is maintaining that configuration over time as things
change.  I have seen many monitoring environments installed and
configured only to become somewhat useless and disused over time as the
configuration isn't kept up to date.

Good luck in your search but in my experience it generally comes down to
putting together a hodge-podge of various tools that give a specific
operation the information it needs as those needs vary from one
operation to the next.

One problem, too, with these tools is that they often collect duplicate
information.  It would be nice to have some common collector/store so
that other tools can pull the information out of that store.  Why have
three different tools querying snmp stats from the same devices? Having
one collector and sharing the data would be a better approach.  There is
an attempt to consolidate various open source tools in a common
framework called GroundWorks.  They aren't completely there yet but I
believe they are pointed in the right direction.


George

 





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