Re: What NMS do you use and why?

[William Herrin <bill () herrin us>]

On Wed, 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?

I still use a tool I wrote in perl nearly 20 years ago called
"MrPing." MrPing handles multi-dependency graphs.

Consider:

A is reachable via either B or C.

If A and B are down but C is up, A being down is a separate failure
from B being down. I need to know about both.

If B and C are both down, A is unreachable. I don't want to receive
alerts about A because they'll distract me from the root cause of the
problem: that both B and C are down. The NMS should record that A is
unreachable but it should also tell me that A being unreachable is a
dependent failure that I can ignore until I fix the failures it
depends on.


The NMSes I've paid attention to either don't support dependencies
well at all or support only simple hierarchical dependencies.
Resilient, professional networks simply aren't built that way.

Regards,
Bill Herrin


-- 
William Herrin ................ herrin () dirtside com  bill () herrin us
Dirtside Systems ......... Web: <http://www.dirtside.com/>