Hi Jay, I have experience with nagios and cacti, now I'm experimenting with logic monitor and observium. The observium is a great tool to discover your network devices but don't have great graphics and don't have any alarm system, but you can get a lot of information about your network devices, connections, ip address, protocols and configurations. Logic Monitor is a new tool for me, but without comparison with nagios, they have well support, but some times you need time to create personal data-points because they don't have recognising for all devices. Nagios could require time for implementation and experience with command line and snmp. not is a expensive tool only if you don't want pay for it. But the nagios XI is a great tool with lot of functions, automatización process, graphics, and capacity planning. You can try with nagios xi with network analyzer. If you don't have budget maybe nagios core and observium can offer a great solution. For comercial solution, I recommend you nagios xi and nagios network analyzer. 2015-01-28 13:06 GMT-05:00 Jay Hennigan <jay@west.net>:
I know that this topic has been kicking around for at least a decade, but wanted to get current opinions of other network operators. Most of us have explored Nagios, MRTG, and several front-ends for MRTG.
We are looking into a new player in the space called Logicmonitor. They have a very functional and easy to navigate front end and configuration tool, and I very much like the look-and-feel of their product.
What I don't like is that they only offer it as a cloud-based service. Internal probes tie in to a "collector" which we maintain. The collector then phones home over the Internet to their hosted service periodically and they remotely analyze the data and generate alerts, plot graphs, etc.
From a technical standpoint this adds more points of failure in series, will cause missed alerts if their cloud-based service goes down (who is guarding the guards?) will cause false alarms if their service is still up but can't reach the collector, and doesn't give us a full view under the hood.
Of course their sales guys are giving us "Our time and energy is dedicated to reliability" and "professionally managed multi-carrier highly secure data centers" language to encourage the warm fuzzies.
From a scalability standpoint we incur ever-increasing recurring costs as we grow and add monitored devices and services.
What's the collective opinion here? Is anyone using them or a similar service? Are there non-cloud-based alternatives that are relatively easy to set up and manage? We've explored Zabbix, Nagios, MRTG and its various wrappers, and Intermapper. Anything else new on the horizon that has a GUI front-end that is configurable without a lot of scripting experience, etc.?
We would love to buy something that works for us and pay a reasonable price for it, but I'm not particularly interested in the equivalent of renting a time-share in order to monitor our networks.
-- Jay Hennigan - CCIE #7880 - Network Engineering - jay@impulse.net Impulse Internet Service - http://www.impulse.net/ Your local telephone and internet company - 805 884-6323 - WB6RDV
-- Cordialmente, Dorancé Martínez Cortés +57 320 6968121 Linux User Number 112632 Nagios Certified Administrator Certificación ITIL Fundation 2011 ed. Cali - Colombia dorancemc@gmail.com http://dmcingenieria.net http://dmci.co "Si piensas que la tecnología puede solucionar tus problemas de seguridad, está claro que ni entiendes los problemas ni entiendes la tecnología" Bruce Schneier