System and Network Monitoring

Wed Dec 16 00:48:06 UTC 1998

OK, I'm looking for "real world" data and not sales/marketing hype.

I'm looking for a package to do network and system monitoring. It's a
heterogenous environment consisting of all manner of routers, at least 700
servers (Mostly FreeBSD, but also Solaris and Network Appliance boxen).

Requirements:

1.) Must support FreeBSD (obviously, its the platform of probably about
98% of the servers)

2.) Must scale well. Today we have (at best guess given by management)
"somewhere between 500 and 1000 servers", but that number grows daily.
Operations adds about 4-5 servers a week at the present time.

3.) Must support the ability to provide checks on custom situations (e.g.,
an external program which checks the output from an e-commerce server to
check that the pricing/qty/etc. is accurate and not stale or outdated)

4.) Must provide a flexible escalation method including e-mail and paging.

5.) Provide a nice interface to quickly find and troubleshoot problems.
Preferably this would be X based, so that the server itself could reside
in our server rooms, exporting the display to whomever had a need to watch
the network/servers, or troubleshoot their particular corner of the world.

I know this product has to exist, but I've only so far found one product
that claims to be able to do all of that (HP OpenView). I'm not against
HP, but I'd like to have some more options than what I currently have
available to me.

Replies probably should be made off-list (and if anyone wants me to, I'll
happily summarize to the list what I get).

Thanks in advance.

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dredd at megacity.org        |  fluffy cat from being a villain in the
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