Network Monitoring Tools
I have been running Nagios to monitor systems on my network. Nagios does a very good job and Nagios is very flexible. After you add a few agents; NRPE for Linux and NSClient for Windows, and you can monitor just about everything in the environment. I have been very happy with the the configuration and alerting within Nagios. I have just started to ask if there was something which could do more.
I also have in my environment; MRTG and Cacti. I have been using MRTG for a while and have even customized it with my own scripts to count things like mail flow and system load. Cacti is a new addition to my environment. I was looking for something non-command line configurable and Cacti has fit the bill. I have even written some custom scripts to port over my mail flow that I put into MRTG.
Is there something that can combine the two environments into one? Instead of having Nagios and MRTG/Catci, can I do it in one? I have started to look at two tools which might be able to do it; Zabbix and Zenoss. Both Zabbix and Zenoss claim to be enterprise solutions. I have been kicking the tires mostly of Zenoss, because there is a VMWare image available and I have to install Zabbix on my Ubuntu server to get it working.
Both Zabbix and Zenoss seem to rely very heavily on SNMP, which is fine if you system support SNMP, but most of my systems do not have SNMP installed on them and I am not certain if I want SNMP installed. The only systems that I have SNMP installed on are core devices like switches, routers, and firewalls. I find SNMP is helpful to understand how much traffic is going through the devices. I am not certain how helpful SNMP will be on my Linux and Windows servers.
For now, I am going to stay with my Nagios and MRTG/Cacti configuration. But that can change.
Comments
Hi, nice popsting sean.i am
Hi, nice popsting sean.i am also using network monitoring tool and your blog really contain many new things so thanks for sharing information.
Dotcom Monitor
I took a look at Dotcom Monitoring and it looks very interesting. If you are looking for external monitoring, then I think the service is very good and detailed, but it does not cover internal monitoring which I what I typically use Nagios for.
Network Monitoring Tools
Hello Sean, i absolutely agree that Nagios is very flexible and powerful tool to monitor your network. But i came across with paid network monitoring service from Dotcom Monitor. Did you test it? I found it very comprehensive, flexible and stable. You know before i signed up i used free network monitoring tool and then i found that approximately 15% of my VPS downtime alerts didn't come to me... And the other situation with Dotcom Monitor.. That system works perfectly. May be the negative side is money you have to pay for the service. So, just take a look at their features http://www.dotcom-monitor.com/network-monitoring.asp
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