What NMS do you use and why?

Thu Aug 16 16:49:35 UTC 2018

Being a small business we like to use a mostly free and open source tools. Our networking monitoring stack presently looks like:

Simple Reachability Monitoring  (Ping) - uptimerobot.com

Just $4.5 per month for 50 monitors with 1 minute intervals (free if you are find with 5 minutes monitoring intervals). This is connected to our slack channel and also sends SMS when something goes offline.

Traffic & Device Monitoring - LibreNMS

A fork of Observium but adds the much needed alerting feature that observing only offers with it's paid plans. We use it to monitor switch port traffic, BGP sessions, device health, etc.

Packet Inspection or Flow Monitoring we use FastNetMon (https://fastnetmon.com/features/) the free edition is good for our needs. 

On August 16, 2018 at 9:16:42 PM, Nick Peelman (npeelman at etc1.net) wrote:

seconded. the pains of maintaining ELK are made worthwhile by this alone.  

-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/>  

Sent from my iPhone  

On Aug 16, 2018, at 11:41, Stan Ouchakov <stano at imaginesoftware.com<mailto:stano at imaginesoftware.com>> wrote:  

Regarding netflow/sflow/ipfix monitoring, we had recently started using elastiflow by Robert Cowart. Scales very well with pretty visualizations. Cannot imagine what paid / supported version has to offer :)  

https://github.com/robcowart/elastiflow  

-----Original Message-----  
From: NANOG <nanog-bounces at nanog.org<mailto:nanog-bounces at nanog.org>> On Behalf Of Joe Loiacono  
Sent: Wednesday, August 15, 2018 8:31 PM  
To: William Herrin <bill at herrin.us<mailto:bill at herrin.us>>  
Cc: NANOG <nanog at nanog.org<mailto:nanog at nanog.org>>  
Subject: Re: What NMS do you use and why?  

Consider also open-source FlowViewer for netflow capture and analysis. A lot of very useful netflow based analytical tools in an easy UI. Sits on top of a robust set of Carnegie-Mellon's high-capacity SiLK netflow tools.  

https://sourceforge.net/projects/flowviewer/  

Joe  

----- Original Message -----  
From: "William Herrin" <bill at herrin.us<mailto:bill at herrin.us>>  
To: "Colton Conor" <colton.conor at gmail.com<mailto:colton.conor at gmail.com>>  
Cc: "NANOG" <nanog at nanog.org<mailto:nanog at nanog.org>>  
Sent: Wednesday, August 15, 2018 3:25:48 PM  
Subject: Re: What NMS do you use and why?  

On Wed, Aug 15, 2018 at 9:49 AM, 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?  

I still use a tool I wrote in perl nearly 20 years ago called "MrPing." MrPing handles multi-dependency graphs.  

Consider:  

A is reachable via either B or C.  

If A and B are down but C is up, A being down is a separate failure from B being down. I need to know about both.  

If B and C are both down, A is unreachable. I don't want to receive alerts about A because they'll distract me from the root cause of the  
problem: that both B and C are down. The NMS should record that A is unreachable but it should also tell me that A being unreachable is a dependent failure that I can ignore until I fix the failures it depends on.  

The NMSes I've paid attention to either don't support dependencies well at all or support only simple hierarchical dependencies.  
Resilient, professional networks simply aren't built that way.  

Regards,  
Bill Herrin  

--  
William Herrin ................ herrin at dirtside.com<mailto:herrin at dirtside.com> bill at herrin.us<mailto:bill at herrin.us> Dirtside Systems ......... Web: <http://www.dirtside.com/>  
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