Network monitoring/IDS rant - What's hot what's not?
Richard Welty
rwelty at averillpark.net
Wed Feb 26 16:55:53 UTC 2003
On Wed, 26 Feb 2003, Pete Kruckenberg wrote:
>
> On Wed, 26 Feb 2003, Christopher L. Morrow wrote:
>
> > CA-Unicenter/OVW/Tivoli are not IDS systems...
> > (traditionally) but they can normally monitor the heck
> > out of 'decent' sized networks (less than 500 components
> > was my last experience with OVW atleast, tivoli and CA
> > we never got working correctly with less than 1 metric
> > butt ton of LOE to keep it running)
> What are the options and recommendations for networks > 500
> components?
i've done this sort of stuff successfully with Aprisma Spectrum.
issues:
1) it's not cheap. on the other hand, Aprisma did used to have a service
provider oriented pay-per-number-of-notes-monitored pricing plan,
which is how we did it back when i was running a Spectrum based NMS
shop.
2) it runs only on W2K and Solaris, and for large installations, runs
much better on Solaris. sizing depends on number of nodes being
monitored. "enough RAM" is important. multiple spindles with well
chosen file system partitioning, and 2 CPUs, also make a difference.
3) getting it to run well requires experience. some default settings
are not very suitable for monitoring large WANs, and it is definitely
not "set up and forget it" software.
4) apropos to 3, budget for training. one or two smart guys who've
been through class can handle it (no need for Aprisma Professional
services.)
5) reporting used to be clumsy, although are were some add-ons available
to improve this.
6) the database used to be a proprietary network database based on the
old VistaDB. they've been migrating towards MySQL, although the
migration isn't complete yet. archived polling data does go into
MySQL, but the database of monitored nodes was still in the
proprietary database the last time i looked at this.
note also that there are a bunch of up-and-coming NMS systems that may or
may not be better than Spectrum. the last time i did an evaluation,
Spectrum was the best in the cost-no-object model, but that was a while
ago.
richard
--
Richard Welty rwelty at averillpark.net
Averill Park Networking 518-573-7592
Unix, Linux, IP Network Engineering, Security
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