[ale] OpenSource NMS Recommendations?

[Christopher Fowler]

Big Brother is one and I often user PERL with Net::SMTP and Net::SNPP :)

On Mon, 2005-07-04 at 17:42, Jay Loden wrote:
> Well, I'm not terribly familiar with Open Source NMS stuff, but I work for 
> Fidelia Techology - we make Helix and NetVigil, network monitoring software. 
> Helix is our smaller software, which is probably more in the range you're 
> describing. http://fidelia.com/products
> 
> Our software does autodiscovery of your network topology, automatically sets 
> up tests and default thresholds, etc. Basically you install it and you're up 
> and running in an hour or two. you'll have up/down status reports, as well as 
> stuff like disk usage, CPU, etc - whatever is monitorable by SNMP or WMI. Our 
> software also does historical data and fancy graphs, etc.
> 
> That being said, I've also used Nagios, previous to being hired by Fidelia - 
> as a matter of fact, I posted to ALE when I was setting it up looking for 
> some help with it. Nagios was capable of decent options, but the 
> configuration files were really rough to wade through. The documentation was 
> lacking, so setting it up and making it work was pretty difficult, at least 
> for me at my level of experience. It was capable, however, and had options 
> for dependencies, service monitoring, and so on, and of course it's free 
> software.
> 
> If it's in your budget and you don't mind close source software, I'd 
> definitely recommend one of our products, if only because the amount of time 
> you save with the auto-discovery of devices and not needing to go through 
> config files to create hosts and service tests.
> 
> If you only have a really small number of devices, (I think you mentioned 5 
> routers and a switch?) it might actually be easier/quicker to write your own 
> set of scripts than to try and set up Nagios. There's a LOT of options and 
> config files for Nagios, and it took me as long to set it up to monitor a 
> dozen or so servers as it probably would have to write a set of scripts to 
> serve the purpose.
> 
> -Jay
> 
> On Monday 04 July 2005 02:28 pm, brucelists at bellsouth.net wrote:
> > Hey all,
> >
> >       I'm considering putting in a basic NMS for my lab. Have any of you
> > worked with open source NMS systems? Any recommendations? I'm looking to do
> > basic up/down monitoring and a tftp server for IOS and router/switch
> > configurations.
> >
> >       I haven't played with any, but it looks like Bigsister and Nagios are
> > the primary choices. I also looked a little at OpenNMS and NMIS
> > (http://www.sins.com.au/nmis/) from the Cisco-Centric Open Source project.
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