Re: Opensource or Low Cost NMS for Server Hardware / Application Monitoring

[Will Clayton <wclayton () corenap com>]

Eric Gauthier wrote:
> Hello,
>
>   
> > As for server / application / random other stuff (like printers and  
> > ups's and IP camera and the like), Zenoss is great -- its clean,  
> > simple, fast(ish), easy  and pretty -- the last one happens to be  
> > important for some folks (esp in the enterprise world...)
> >     
>
> We've looked at ZenOSS but couldn't get it to model the network.
> >From what we can tell, it couldn't handle the full routing table
> on our core routers (there are six).  If someone has successfully 
> done this, can you contact me off list?
>
> Eric :)

I like NMIS. Fast, scalable, flexible and really hackable. It doesn't 
take much time to get it up and running but selling others on it can be 
challenging. It works off of flat tab delimited text files making 
populating the node base pretty easy. There are plans for NMIS5 to use 
database connectivity for this which will be even more fun. There are 
external contributions that do everything from RANCID to Flash maps of 
your network. The home page is here:

http://sins.com.au/nmis/

But has since moved to sourceforge:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/nmis/files/

With the gang being here:

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/nmis_users/

While not for everyone and not as popular or pretty as some of the 
others, it is a network monitoring system built by engineers for 
engineers. With a combination of SNMP data collection and ping/service 
tests, bandwidth utilization alerts, alert groups, thresholds etc. can 
be adjusted on a per-device basis and just a week of utilization can 
really help you identify points on the network that need to be cleaned up.

I guess my favorite part is the ability to write device interface 
descriptions to trigger actions in the Perl script since that data is 
collected via SNMP.

--
Will Clayton