On 3/28/06, Ashe Canvar <acanvar@gmail.com> wrote:
I want a simple backbone monitor for my 5 datacenters. My "backbone" consists of redundant IPSEC/GRE tunnnels.
At the very least I want to ping, traceroute and transfer a small file every few minutes over all IPSEC links. I am sure there are products that do this already, but I am having a hard time finding any.
autostatus, mrtg, cricket, hobbitmon, cacti, nagios, big brother,are all good options, find these and more on Freshmeat: http://freshmeat.net/browse/152/
The display format should be noc-friendly. A basic grid with green/red status indicators at the least. Geographical maps a plus.
For noc-friendly latency reporting, look at SmokePing. For deeper tests of HTTP page loads and file transfers, HobbitMon could be what you're looking for. I'm not aware of any freeware products which draw nice geographic maps, we have OpenView for that. A few years ago I started work towards generating dynamic network status graphics with Graphviz, but management decided it would be easier and faster to buy OpenView licenses.
Do most of you use a home grown tool for this monitoring and alerting ?
I've found that I always end up writing some custom code, but you could do worse than to build on top of one of the open-source monitoring tools. For example, I use a highly customized version of AutoStatus for up/down alerting, primarily because I like how it handles dependencies. Kevin