[128902] in North American Network Operators' Group
RE: Monitoring Tools
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Nathan Eisenberg)
Thu Aug 19 15:52:47 2010
From: Nathan Eisenberg <nathan@atlasnetworks.us>
To: "nanog@nanog.org" <nanog@nanog.org>
Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2010 19:52:22 +0000
In-Reply-To: <02a501cb3fd1$2cb70de0$862529a0$@net>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
It hasn't really changed. Almost every monitoring package I've found where=
you want to monitor something like 'disk space free on /' requires a daemo=
n of some sort on the host - whether that's SNMPD or their agent. FWIW, I =
have had their agent running on many, many servers over the years - it has =
never caused me a moment of heartache (for safety's sake, iptables restrict=
s who can talk to the agent, which has its own control mechanism built in t=
o define who it will talk to, and it runs as a restricted user, just in cas=
e). =20
If you don't want to use their agent, you can monitor hosts via SNMP (if yo=
u run snmpd on your servers) or via server-side checks (is 80 listening? D=
oes the site at http://www.google.com contain "I'm feeling lucky"? Can I p=
ing 4.2.2.2? Etc...).
However, the OP was about monitoring network environments (which I took to =
mean routers/switches/firewalls/blah, not hosts). These devices typically =
speak SNMP, so $MonitoringSolution will just talk SNMP to it, and you don't=
have to worry about any agents. :-)
-Nathan
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Scott Berkman [mailto:scott@sberkman.net]
> Sent: Thursday, August 19, 2010 12:03 PM
> To: Nathan Eisenberg; nanog@nanog.org
> Subject: RE: Monitoring Tools
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> The last time I looked, my main issue with Zabbix was that it required (o=
r
> greatly preferred) their proprietary agent on every host. This may have
> changed.
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> -Scott
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Nathan Eisenberg [mailto:nathan@atlasnetworks.us]
> Sent: Thursday, August 19, 2010 2:53 PM
> To: nanog@nanog.org
> Subject: RE: Monitoring Tools
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> > Am looking for an opensource network monitoring tool with ability to
> create
> > different views for different users.
> >
> > Regards,Jacob
> >
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> Just to add another opinion to the pot, I've used zabbix in several large
> environments, and I like it a lot. The developer team is decently sized,=
and very
> responsive to requests and feedback (they operate a commercial 'support'
> model for the platform, so working on the system is literally their day j=
ob - as
> George pointed out, this is often a problem).
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> Zabbix also supports distributed monitoring, which is very handy for scal=
ing or
> for monitoring multiple locations without dealing with VPNS and the like =
(or if
> you have places you need to monitor behind NATs!). Its major weakness at=
the
> moment is the weak support for SNMP traps (works great in polling mode,
> though), so you will want a separate simple system for catching traps. I=
n my
> opinion, that's just fine, because statistics/trending/basic resource ale=
rting/etc
> are best kept separate from things like "OMG one of my powersupplies is
> dead!!11one".
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> Also supports IPMI, which is nice if you have IPMI deployed. :-)
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> Best Regards,
> Nathan Eisenberg
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