Thanks to all who replied. Due to ease of deployment I will probably go with the Cent)S based server and tools and modify things as I need it afterwards. Best of luck, Vitto, On Tue, Dec 9, 2008 at 4:00 PM, Claudia de Luna <cldeluna@yahoo.com> wrote:
Vito,
I"m currently consulting to the state of California corrections department on their wan and this question continually comes up.
My recommendation is to get started with CactiEZ as you SNMP management tool. CactiEZ is a CentOS based Cacti server that essentially loads everything you need to get up and running. If you already have an authoratative and complete list of all your network infrastructure equipment it is then a simple matter of adding the devices to the server. Out of the box you get your syslog server (essential) with some basic search capabilities, your monitoring for bandwidth utilization, errors, latency (ping based) and router CPU.
You can grow from there with notification (it's pretty basic but better than nothing), availability reports, and even a weather map.
As someone else already said, use the OS you are most comfortable with. Running monitoring on a network is a full time job in and of itself so don't complicate things!
Tools like OpenNMS and Nagios are a little more complex. The CactiEZ CD is pretty much turnkey and gives you most, if not all, the tools to get you up and running. From there you can see what needs it does not meet and grow from there.
Claudia
This link lists the "plug ins" available out of the box but there are others as Cacti has a very good plug in architecture. http://cactiusers.org/wiki/Homepage
Example WeatherMap
------------------------------ *From:* vitto malitani <vmalitani@gmail.com> *To:* nanog@nanog.org *Sent:* Tuesday, December 9, 2008 9:17:40 AM *Subject:* Net Mgmt Tools and supporting OS
I am fairly new user of nanog mail list so I am not sure if the question below is appropriate for this list. If not, please excuse it. - I am building a new low-budget customer WAN/LAN network and need some ideas for network management tools. I've seen couple of email threads regarding all sort of "net goodies". However, since I haven't used them all, I am not sure which OS would be the most appropriate for these aps? Can anyone share their ideas in regards of apps and supporting platforms? I would be most comfortable with free distribution of linux, but I am not sure which distro supports most of the tools? Is the paid OS required for all these tools, like RedHat Server or SuSe or Windows platforms?
Thanks much,
Vitto