Re: What NMS do you use and why?

[Nick Peelman <npeelman () ETC1 net>]

I think anybody looking for a be-all-end-all solution will find nothing but heartburn.

different suites have different strong suits, and deciding you are going to pursue one and ignore all others may mean 
living without a feature or set of features you may find really useful or eventually necessary. but maintaining 
multiple complete NMSes isn’t really tenable either.

all of that said, we use a combination of a couple. Nagios/Icinga because it’s been around forever (both in the world 
and in our network), and the power of script based checks, being able to write your own handlers and pretty much just 
leverage it as a framework you can shove questions into and get regular answers from is invaluable.

LibreNMS gives us the best pretty pictures, letting us monitor much much more than just interface traffic, out of the 
box. much more than cacti is capable of without a ton of work (i.e. down to the tx/rx power and temperature readings of 
individual SFPs). it scales relatively well; at least in theory. i will be able to tell you for sure later this year as 
we are near the limits of what we can monitor with a single polling device. alerting out of Libre into Slack has proven 
quite fantastic. we can spawn threads attached to anything from a BGP peer dropping or a CPU alert as we move to triage 
and solve, even if we are in the field or meetings or whatever.

we also still have cacti around for random one-offs. as great as Libre is, its poller can be a bit intense for some 
devices; so in those cases it’s safer for us to just have cacti graph the one or two OIDs we need specifically, without 
trolling all the other available sensors.

we ran OpenNMS for a bit, but it proved way to dumb to maintain a large (and growing) complex network, without 
dedicating at least one or two people to the care and feeding of it.

-nick

—
Nick Peelman
Network Engineer | Enhanced Telecommunications Corp.
812-222-0169<tel:812-222-0169> | npeelman () etc1 net<mailto:npeelman () etc1 net> | 
www.etczone.com<http://www.etczone.com/>

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 15, 2018, at 09:49, Colton Conor <colton.conor () gmail com<mailto:colton.conor () gmail com>> wrote:

We are looking for a new network monitoring system. Since there are so many operators on this list, I would like to 
know which NMS do you use and why? Is there one that you really like, and others that you hate?

For free options (opensouce), LibreNMS and NetXMS come highly recommended by many wireless ISPs on low budgets. 
However, I am not sure the commercial options available nor their price points.