Network Monitoring

[Theldron]

Hi all,

 

Looking at network monitoring software. Due to budget cannot afford to buy one (shame as saw Solarwinds being used when went for interview at school looked awesome), so looking at free.

 

I have used Spiceworks in the past, which I liked but used for inventory as well and crashed at 400 assets, anyone used just for monitoring? Currently playing with The Dude, Fully Automated Nagios and Pandora FMS community edition.

 

Anyone recommend anything else or particularly one of these?

 

Want to be able to see at a glance if anything is down, but also to be able to see network connections between assets and fibre connections.

 

Thanks

[synaesthesia]

The Dude is pretty good for that, we've been using it for some time for monitoring the status and bandwidth usage of and between switches, internet and servers. Have it displayed across a couple of monitors in the office for an at-a-glance proactive approach

Edited January 8, 2018 by synaesthesia

[ITGURU]

I use various tools,:

The Dude

Paessler PRTG network monitor (free 100 sensors)

HP System insight manager for all servers (HP)

Syslog watcher

[pete]

We use Icinga for up/down/service outages/weird notifications, Observium for trend graphing mostly, though it also does up/down/outages and automapping using CDP/LLDP) and Wazuh for log aggregation and host-based IDS.

 

Observium's nicer and easier to configure, but not as flexible as Icinga - there's few things you can't monitor in Icinga if you're prepared to faff for long enough. On the other hand, the Observium fork called LibreNMS is more receptive to user feedback.

 

Wazuh's lovely, but they lag a bit behind ELK versions so you need to be cautious when updating.

[jthompson]

Have a look at Check_MK. It's built on Nagios, but adds tonnes of nice stuff, including it's own UI, agents for servers, lovely graphs, improved notifications, tonnes of plugins for monitoring different stuff (UPS, backups, DHCP scopes, individual files, etc.). It's now available standalone (Check_MK Raw is the free version), and much easier to work with than vanilla Nagios Core.

 

We've been using it for a few years, back from when it was included is part of OMDistro (which has now essentially turned into what Check_MK is now) and would be lost without it.

[Davit2005]

PRTG, see if you can get an educational discount. The 100 sensors may well be enough for a (very)small network but once you see how much you can do with them it may not be enough. OpenNMS is real complicated I find but prob equally as good as PRTG. The only issue with PRTG is it sits on Windows OS so you have an additional license consideration.

 

I do like the look of the Dude though, never used it mind.

 

I guess it depends on how much you want to monitor.

Edited January 8, 2018 by Davit2005

[synaesthesia]

Yeah I looked at quite a few, PRTG worked out silly expensive, OpenNMS indeed complicated and I didn't really fancy the legwork with the likes of that or Nagios.

The Dude ticked a few boxes, the two biggest boxes being cost (free) and being reasonably simple. I like simple

[stevewill6]

I use Total Network Monitor 1.1.3

 

Very basic traffic light system. Free to use.

 

[Geoff]

Also consider Zabbix.

 

https://www.zabbix.com

 

Edited January 8, 2018 by Geoff

[Priscilla110]

OpenNMS is a great opensource network monitoring tool. It is reliable and gets the job done.

[MatthewL]

Nagios or Zenoss are two I have used in the past.

[m25man]

CheckMK, built on Nagios excellent.

[ellsandell]

LibreNMS is excellent.

[TechMonkey]

Depends on what you want to monitor. We get by with the PRTG free license (100 Sensors) to monitor that switches and servers are up, check admin group numbers don't change and then some checks such as Internet is still useable, SIP trunk is there, SANs are happy, our website is contactable and Internet pipe is OK.

 

It is invaluable on our signage to see if anything is playing up and to flag issues but it can be very easy (and tempting) to monitor everything and then end up not seeing anything.

[markwilfan]

+1 for libre nms for me. Can't get enough of it . Easy to set up, free and fast

[mdrabble]

Have installed Zabbix and LibreNMS and i prefer LibreNMS simply because it has nice graphs and was easier to configure.

[pete]

It is invaluable on our signage to see if anything is playing up and to flag issues but it can be very easy (and tempting) to monitor everything and then end up not seeing anything.

 

We tend to monitor everything (so we have metrics when we need them for budgetary / planning reasons) and just alert on the things we care about.

 

That said, we're not paying per-sensor.

[Duke5A]

I'm using an old version of The Dude. It's free and only does SNMP polling, but anything that can be monitored via SNMP it'll monitor. I've got it looking after switches, servers, virtual machines and hosts, firewall, battery backups, copy machines, etc... You can create your probes for it and functions for reporting. If the temperature in the data center gets too hot, or even the storage volume on the mail server gets too full it'll send me text messages.

 

Attached is a map of our largest building.

 

Edited January 24, 2019 by Duke5A

[Olliesaurus]

Im using The Dude but pretty desperate to get LibreNMS running, whatever I do I just cant get it running and working, have tried several guides and spent nights trying to figure out why its not installing correctly, getting close to throwing in the towel unless I can find some amazing guide that actually works when I do it...

[skell]

LibreNMS works great.

 

What server spec does everyone use for it? We have around 100 devices.