Monitoring Tools

Thu Aug 19 19:52:22 UTC 2010

It hasn't really changed.  Almost every monitoring package I've found where you want to monitor something like 'disk space free on /' requires a daemon of some sort on the host - whether that's SNMPD or their agent.  FWIW, I have had their agent running on many, many servers over the years - it has never caused me a moment of heartache (for safety's sake, iptables restricts who can talk to the agent, which has its own control mechanism built in to define who it will talk to, and it runs as a restricted user, just in case).  

If you don't want to use their agent, you can monitor hosts via SNMP (if you run snmpd on your servers) or via server-side checks (is 80 listening?  Does the site at http://www.google.com contain "I'm feeling lucky"?  Can I ping 4.2.2.2?  Etc...).

However, the OP was about monitoring network environments (which I took to mean routers/switches/firewalls/blah, not hosts).  These devices typically speak SNMP, so $MonitoringSolution will just talk SNMP to it, and you don't have to worry about any agents.  :-)

-Nathan

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Scott Berkman [mailto:scott at sberkman.net]
> Sent: Thursday, August 19, 2010 12:03 PM
> To: Nathan Eisenberg; nanog at nanog.org
> Subject: RE: Monitoring Tools
> 
> The last time I looked, my main issue with Zabbix was that it required (or
> greatly preferred) their proprietary agent on every host.  This may have
> changed.
> 
> 	-Scott
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Nathan Eisenberg [mailto:nathan at atlasnetworks.us]
> Sent: Thursday, August 19, 2010 2:53 PM
> To: nanog at nanog.org
> Subject: RE: Monitoring Tools
> 
> > Am looking for an opensource network monitoring tool with ability to
> create
> > different views for different users.
> >
> > Regards,Jacob
> >
> 
> Just to add another opinion to the pot, I've used zabbix in several large
> environments, and I like it a lot.  The developer team is decently sized, and very
> responsive to requests and feedback (they operate a commercial 'support'
> model for the platform, so working on the system is literally their day job - as
> George pointed out, this is often a problem).
> 
> Zabbix also supports distributed monitoring, which is very handy for scaling or
> for monitoring multiple locations without dealing with VPNS and the like (or if
> you have places you need to monitor behind NATs!).  Its major weakness at the
> moment is the weak support for SNMP traps (works great in polling mode,
> though), so you will want a separate simple system for catching traps.  In my
> opinion, that's just fine, because statistics/trending/basic resource alerting/etc
> are best kept separate from things like "OMG one of my powersupplies is
> dead!!11one".
> 
> Also supports IPMI, which is nice if you have IPMI deployed.  :-)
> 
> Best Regards,
> Nathan Eisenberg
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 