Network Monitoring Display Screen

[mitchell1981]

Does anyone know of a piece of software that can monitor various items on a network and then display the infomation in a nice format for a display screen. I have a large plasma screen going spare (it's damaged and doesn't display colours that well).

I would like to monitor things like switch status, server status, printer status etc..

I don't know much about it but I believe that SNMP is designed for this sort of thing. Are there any applications that use SNMP and make it easy to display information in this way.

Thanks.

[Marci]

TheDude - free from MikroTik

See our basic monitoring screen below. It's expanded somewhat since then.

netmon4.jpg

[mitchell1981]

Thanks that looks like the sort of thing. I'll give it a try!

[m25man]

Look at the PT360 from Quest Software it's free (Registration Required) and will look really impressive on your big screen...

[Jackd]

Cacti + Nagios along with Cacti View and Naglite2 all free.

[davipton]

I have setup this week and still testing Nagios (Nagios - The Industry Standard in IT Infrastructure Monitoring) seems to do what i want it to do. Will also look at the other suggestions people have made.

[Edu-IT]

I have setup this week and still testing Nagios (Nagios - The Industry Standard in IT Infrastructure Monitoring) seems to do what i want it to do. Will also look at the other suggestions people have made.

Do you have any setup instructions you'd recommend?

[davipton]

Edu-IT, I just followed the documentation from the Nagios download site (Nagios - Nagios Downloads). I am running it on Ubuntu (as its free!!). There is a step by step guide on how to install Nagios on Ubuntu (Nagios Quickstart Installation Guides). I did at first use Ubuntu's software centre to download and install this for me, but as the modules from the download install the plugins and addons all over the system i decided to do the manual installation via the "Quickstart" guide. If you want any further assistance please do not hesitate to contact me.

Regards,
David

[Edu-IT]

Are you using the latest version of Ubuntu? Those instructions refer to an older version but I don't imagine anything drastically changing?

[sideh]

+1 on Nagios.

I would also take a look at nagvis. (NagVis | NagVis.org)

With nagvis you can display specific service or host groups with custom background images. Very cool stuff.

I just used apt to install nagios. Slightly older version but much less hassle. Also, Nagios Exchange has a tonne of plugins for everything imaginable although It's fairly trivial to write your own.

One thing I will say is that Nagios is a huge pain in the arse to setup, but once it's up and running its easy to manage.

[davipton]

Yeah i'm using 10.04 and followed the instructions on the nagios site. It was a pain the first time i installed it as Ubuntu was new to me so didn't totally install correctly. Second time, went better and is up and running. I'm just mucking around with what services and monitor levels i want for my different servers etc.

[Edu-IT]

I'm thinking of running Ubuntu in a VM and getting Nagios setup on that.

Editing the .cfg files looks confusing however. Is this an easy thing to do?

[ChrisH]

There is some info on the wiki Nagios - Wiki