Intelligent network monitoring systems (commercial/open source, what have you)

Fri Sep 11 19:17:22 UTC 2009

Drew Weaver wrote:
> Ah, I was mainly interested in an Orion like system that actually has all of that kind of worked-in.

Yeah I got that. I am not aware of anything that does that. Not to say 
it doesn't exist, but if it does it's somewhat well hidden.

http://www.frank4dd.com/howto/nagios/cisco-patch-update-monitoring.htm 
looks interesting and has come up in several searches I've done in the 
past when needing to monitor cisco kit.

I'm guessing CiscoWorks might have what you are looking for?

I've never been happy with the big commercial NMS products. NAGIOS(with 
SNMP plugin)+mrtg/cacti+smokeping has served me and many of my 
colleagues very well.

There is alerting and trending which must be taken into consideration.

Alerting is pretty easy, especially with giving nagios knowledge of 
hierarchy (if a switch or router stops responding you don't get alerts 
for all the servers attached/downstream of it). You can easily automate 
the setup with things like nmap2nagios and other tools.

Trending (which it seems is your primary concern) is harder. Zabbix has 
some cool SLA reporting and dashboards.

I seem to recall a FLOSS NMS thread a few months ago on here, or maybe 
it was c-nsp. Dunno.

Are you primarily concerned with monitoring, or with trending/capacity 
planning?

> 
> Thanks for the heads up.
> -Drew
> -----Original Message-----