nanog mailing list archives

Re: What NMS do you use and why?


From: Jason Lixfeld <jason+nanog () lixfeld ca>
Date: Wed, 15 Aug 2018 12:41:17 -0400

(resending with really, really the correct from:)

Here’s a snapshot of what tends to work for me, along with my $0.02 of thoughts:

- Observium handles polling, graphing and alerting for SNMP exposed objects on network devices,
- I feel that a visual representation of the physical network topology is extremely helpful for many aspects of 
day-to-day operations, so InterMapper handles that,
- Syslog and SNMPTRAP collection, correlation and alerting is handled by Splunk,
- Netflow collection and graphing is handled by nfsen,
- Smokeping for what smokeping does (but I just discovered vaping this morning, which looks awesome and will get some 
love).

I believe that LibraNMS has at some capability to use more robust graphing engines, which for me would be great; I find 
rrd is a little limiting these days.  I think it also has (better?) support for weathermap, so I could technically 
replace InterMapper with weathermap and collapse the tool chain a bit.

With streaming telemetry becoming more of a thing, there will definitely be a shift away from SNMP for things that are 
polled for statistics.

There are interesting Netflow tools like Elastiflow and pmacct that are more robust than nfsen.  The latter has a ton 
of functionality that can produce some interesting data for purposes of traffic engineering, among other things.  The 
former uses ELK so it’s inherently gorgeous and fast, but it requires a ton of resources depending on the number of 
flows/sec that you’re collecting.

Hope that helps.

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 15, 2018, at 9:49 AM, Colton Conor <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.




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