Too much widsom in just a single email Paolo On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 09:04:13AM -0700, George Bonser wrote:
-----Original Message----- From: jacob miller Sent: Thursday, August 19, 2010 4:36 AM To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: Monitoring Tools
Phil,
Am looking for availability reports,bandwidth usage,alerting service and ability to create different logins to users so they can access diff objects
Thnks,
Jacob,
I have not yet found a monitoring environment to my liking and I have seen most of them over the years. That is a project that could keep someone busy for a decade or so (and is one of the things I might work on when I retire). It seems that the more configurable they are, the less intuitive they are and more difficult to get configured properly. Many of the open source tools have only one or two active developers who also have lives outside the project and dealing with a flood of feature requests from the field can be more than they can reasonably accommodate. The commercial monitoring environments can be extremely expensive and very difficult to configure. More important than configuring them is maintaining that configuration over time as things change. I have seen many monitoring environments installed and configured only to become somewhat useless and disused over time as the configuration isn't kept up to date.
Good luck in your search but in my experience it generally comes down to putting together a hodge-podge of various tools that give a specific operation the information it needs as those needs vary from one operation to the next.
One problem, too, with these tools is that they often collect duplicate information. It would be nice to have some common collector/store so that other tools can pull the information out of that store. Why have three different tools querying snmp stats from the same devices? Having one collector and sharing the data would be a better approach. There is an attempt to consolidate various open source tools in a common framework called GroundWorks. They aren't completely there yet but I believe they are pointed in the right direction.
George