Hi David - Your question is well-timed. I just put up for anonymous FTP the Rover 4.0 code (beta). The previous versions of Internet Rover code has been in use since the NSFNET days and has been downloaded and put in production in many locations around the world. The original idea was to code a simple way to perform tests on network devices and create alerts when the tests failed. Many folks have added tests to the package and contributed them back for incorporation into the software. Current tests include: WWW, Named, SMTP, FTP, TELNET, PING, PORT, etc. Basically, if you can make a subroutine that returns a Pass/Fail, it can be incorporated into the code. These earlier versions of the code has scaled to about a thousand nodes in our NOC. This 4.0 version uses SNMP to externalize the list of alerts that Rover generates to centralized network management station(s) for consolidation into a single aggregate alert screen. This allows one to distribute the monitoring function as appropriate and only pull back the list of what is broken in the area. The cool thing is you can then build your hierarchy of management stations in a lego block approach. Currently the code has only been ported/tested on Solaris and SunOS systems. The real release is going out after some other folks verify that it works in their environment -- let me know your experiences with it... It shouldn't take long to install: edit a couple files and type ./configure;make The beta code and documentation is at: http://www.merit.edu/internet.tools/rover Hope this helps. Bill At 10:04 AM 7/11/97 -0400, David Hares - ADP Autonet wrote:

I would like to solicit recommendations for network monitoring utilities. We are attempting to monitor around a thousand nodes (and growing). We're using SunNet Manager since we're primarily a Sun shop. The problem is it's taking a full time programmer (me) to keep up with the changes in our net. It doesn't seem like it ought to take that much effort. The operations staff is competent and ought to be able to configure a monitoring utility. Also, SunNet seems to be a cpu hog. At the rate it uses up cpu, I'll need a giga-SPARC by next year.

So, the question of the day is what's in use and really works ? I'm not enamored of cute GUI interfaces, particularly ones that try to draw my network out before giveing any useful information. Among other problems, running these over a less than wonderful connection to my hotel room is painful. Something that scales well into multipe thousands of nodes would be nice.

Thanks in advance. -- David L. Hares, Senior Staff Programmer AutoNet Phone: (313) 995-6539 175 Jackson Plaza FAX : (313) 995-6458 Ann Arbor, MI 48106 (USA) Email: dhares@autonet.net

-------------------------------------------------------------- William B. Norton <wbn@merit.edu> (313) 764-9430