What NMS do you use and why?

Wed Aug 15 23:14:32 UTC 2018

I think anybody looking for a be-all-end-all solution will find nothing but heartburn.

different suites have different strong suits, and deciding you are going to pursue one and ignore all others may mean living without a feature or set of features you may find really useful or eventually necessary. but maintaining multiple complete NMSes isn’t really tenable either.

all of that said, we use a combination of a couple. Nagios/Icinga because it’s been around forever (both in the world and in our network), and the power of script based checks, being able to write your own handlers and pretty much just leverage it as a framework you can shove questions into and get regular answers from is invaluable.

LibreNMS gives us the best pretty pictures, letting us monitor much much more than just interface traffic, out of the box. much more than cacti is capable of without a ton of work (i.e. down to the tx/rx power and temperature readings of individual SFPs). it scales relatively well; at least in theory. i will be able to tell you for sure later this year as we are near the limits of what we can monitor with a single polling device. alerting out of Libre into Slack has proven quite fantastic. we can spawn threads attached to anything from a BGP peer dropping or a CPU alert as we move to triage and solve, even if we are in the field or meetings or whatever.

we also still have cacti around for random one-offs. as great as Libre is, its poller can be a bit intense for some devices; so in those cases it’s safer for us to just have cacti graph the one or two OIDs we need specifically, without trolling all the other available sensors.

we ran OpenNMS for a bit, but it proved way to dumb to maintain a large (and growing) complex network, without dedicating at least one or two people to the care and feeding of it.

-nick

—
Nick Peelman
Network Engineer | Enhanced Telecommunications Corp.
812-222-0169<tel:812-222-0169> | npeelman at etc1.net<mailto:npeelman at etc1.net> | www.etczone.com<http://www.etczone.com/>

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On Aug 15, 2018, at 09:49, Colton Conor <colton.conor at gmail.com<mailto: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.