What NMS do you use and why?

Wed Aug 15 16:41:17 UTC 2018

(resending with really, really the correct from:)

Here’s a snapshot of what tends to work for me, along with my $0.02 of thoughts:

- Observium handles polling, graphing and alerting for SNMP exposed objects on network devices,
- I feel that a visual representation of the physical network topology is extremely helpful for many aspects of day-to-day operations, so InterMapper handles that,
- Syslog and SNMPTRAP collection, correlation and alerting is handled by Splunk,
- Netflow collection and graphing is handled by nfsen,
- Smokeping for what smokeping does (but I just discovered vaping this morning, which looks awesome and will get some love).

I believe that LibraNMS has at some capability to use more robust graphing engines, which for me would be great; I find rrd is a little limiting these days.  I think it also has (better?) support for weathermap, so I could technically replace InterMapper with weathermap and collapse the tool chain a bit.

With streaming telemetry becoming more of a thing, there will definitely be a shift away from SNMP for things that are polled for statistics.

There are interesting Netflow tools like Elastiflow and pmacct that are more robust than nfsen.  The latter has a ton of functionality that can produce some interesting data for purposes of traffic engineering, among other things.  The former uses ELK so it’s inherently gorgeous and fast, but it requires a ton of resources depending on the number of flows/sec that you’re collecting.

Hope that helps.

Sent from my iPhone

> On Aug 15, 2018, at 9:49 AM, Colton Conor <colton.conor at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> We are looking for a new network monitoring system. Since there are so many operators on this list, I would like to know which NMS do you use and why? Is there one that you really like, and others that you hate? 
> 
> For free options (opensouce), LibreNMS and NetXMS come highly recommended by many wireless ISPs on low budgets. However, I am not sure the commercial options available nor their price points.
> 
> 