[128892] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Monitoring Tools
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Paolo Lucente)
Thu Aug 19 13:54:07 2010
Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2010 17:54:02 +0000
From: Paolo Lucente <pl+list@pmacct.net>
To: George Bonser <gbonser@seven.com>
In-Reply-To: <5A6D953473350C4B9995546AFE9939EE0A52AA10@RWC-EX1.corp.seven.com>
Cc: jacob miller <mmzinyi@yahoo.com>, nanog@nanog.org
Reply-To: Paolo Lucente <pl+list@pmacct.net>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
Too much widsom in just a single email
Paolo
On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 09:04:13AM -0700, George Bonser wrote:
>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: jacob miller
> > Sent: Thursday, August 19, 2010 4:36 AM
> > To: nanog@nanog.org
> > Subject: Re: Monitoring Tools
> >
> > Phil,
> >
> > Am looking for availability reports,bandwidth usage,alerting service
> > and ability to create different logins to users so they can access
> diff
> > objects
> >
> > Thnks,
>
> Jacob,
>
> I have not yet found a monitoring environment to my liking and I have
> seen most of them over the years. That is a project that could keep
> someone busy for a decade or so (and is one of the things I might work
> on when I retire). It seems that the more configurable they are, the
> less intuitive they are and more difficult to get configured properly.
> Many of the open source tools have only one or two active developers who
> also have lives outside the project and dealing with a flood of feature
> requests from the field can be more than they can reasonably
> accommodate. The commercial monitoring environments can be extremely
> expensive and very difficult to configure. More important than
> configuring them is maintaining that configuration over time as things
> change. I have seen many monitoring environments installed and
> configured only to become somewhat useless and disused over time as the
> configuration isn't kept up to date.
>
> Good luck in your search but in my experience it generally comes down to
> putting together a hodge-podge of various tools that give a specific
> operation the information it needs as those needs vary from one
> operation to the next.
>
> One problem, too, with these tools is that they often collect duplicate
> information. It would be nice to have some common collector/store so
> that other tools can pull the information out of that store. Why have
> three different tools querying snmp stats from the same devices? Having
> one collector and sharing the data would be a better approach. There is
> an attempt to consolidate various open source tools in a common
> framework called GroundWorks. They aren't completely there yet but I
> believe they are pointed in the right direction.
>
>
> George
>
>
>
>
