On Wed, Aug 15, 2018 at 08:49:12AM -0500, Colton Conor wrote:

We are looking for a new network monitoring system. Since there are so many operators on this list, I would like to know which NMS do you use and why? Is there one that you really like, and others that you hate?

For free options (opensouce), LibreNMS and NetXMS come highly recommended by many wireless ISPs on low budgets. However, I am not sure the commercial options available nor their price points.

For monitoring network device/interface data plane reachability with ping, we are still using an ancient piece of open source software called Autostatus. I find it invaluable for notifying us about reachability issues with it's simple to understand parent/child relationships and graph-based fping methodology. It isn't perfect--it doesn't scale very well, it doesn't have HA/clustering, it has no fancy dependencies (just basic parent-child) and no event correlation, no contact scheduling, no API, etc. but it is very easy to understand why you are getting an alert or not and boiling that down to a single point of failure and as such it provides reliable, trustable information about data plane reachability from one vantage point on the network. For monitoring server & network service availability, device/environmental health, etc. we are currently using Nagios. My problems with it are that it has complex rules for how/when to perform a specific health check and send or suppress a notification (and perhaps bugs in our old version that never ever seems to send any Host notifications except when it does) and the whole idea of "suppress the Host check unless all Service checks for all services on the host are down" doesn't really fit well with the idea of monitoring device/interface reachability on routers & switches that make up a complex graph of dependencies. Trying to shoehorn Nagios into alerting on just the one IP address/device/interface that is causing all the others behind it to be unreachable doesn't work very well. You can't use Host Depenencies because Host checks are suppressed by default, and Host Dependencies don't affect Service Checks/notifications. Forcing Host checks to always run causes performance problems. Creating a "Ping" service for every host requires creating manual Service Dependencies between all the "Ping" services on every Host. Then you end up with a complex configuration that is very hard to understand. But for things like telling you when a power supply or fan has died, or if the web service crashed, it works well. We did a survey of a bunch of open source tools to replace Nagios and have settled on Icinga for it's APIs, dynamic rules with pattern matching and boolean logic, and compatibility with Nagios plugins. But it still doesn't change the basic architectural choices of the Nagios core engine and hence isn't a good fit for network device/interface reachability monitoring IMO.

(resending with really, really the correct from:) Here’s a snapshot of what tends to work for me, along with my $0.02 of thoughts: - Observium handles polling, graphing and alerting for SNMP exposed objects on network devices, - I feel that a visual representation of the physical network topology is extremely helpful for many aspects of day-to-day operations, so InterMapper handles that, - Syslog and SNMPTRAP collection, correlation and alerting is handled by Splunk, - Netflow collection and graphing is handled by nfsen, - Smokeping for what smokeping does (but I just discovered vaping this morning, which looks awesome and will get some love). I believe that LibraNMS has at some capability to use more robust graphing engines, which for me would be great; I find rrd is a little limiting these days. I think it also has (better?) support for weathermap, so I could technically replace InterMapper with weathermap and collapse the tool chain a bit. With streaming telemetry becoming more of a thing, there will definitely be a shift away from SNMP for things that are polled for statistics. There are interesting Netflow tools like Elastiflow and pmacct that are more robust than nfsen. The latter has a ton of functionality that can produce some interesting data for purposes of traffic engineering, among other things. The former uses ELK so it’s inherently gorgeous and fast, but it requires a ton of resources depending on the number of flows/sec that you’re collecting. Hope that helps. Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 15, 2018, at 9:49 AM, Colton Conor <colton.conor@gmail.com> wrote:

We are looking for a new network monitoring system. Since there are so many operators on this list, I would like to know which NMS do you use and why? Is there one that you really like, and others that you hate?

For free options (opensouce), LibreNMS and NetXMS come highly recommended by many wireless ISPs on low budgets. However, I am not sure the commercial options available nor their price points.

On Wed, Aug 15, 2018 at 9:49 AM, Colton Conor <colton.conor@gmail.com> wrote:

We are looking for a new network monitoring system. Since there are so many operators on this list, I would like to know which NMS do you use and why? Is there one that you really like, and others that you hate?

I still use a tool I wrote in perl nearly 20 years ago called "MrPing." MrPing handles multi-dependency graphs. Consider: A is reachable via either B or C. If A and B are down but C is up, A being down is a separate failure from B being down. I need to know about both. If B and C are both down, A is unreachable. I don't want to receive alerts about A because they'll distract me from the root cause of the problem: that both B and C are down. The NMS should record that A is unreachable but it should also tell me that A being unreachable is a dependent failure that I can ignore until I fix the failures it depends on. The NMSes I've paid attention to either don't support dependencies well at all or support only simple hierarchical dependencies. Resilient, professional networks simply aren't built that way. Regards, Bill Herrin -- William Herrin ................ herrin@dirtside.com bill@herrin.us Dirtside Systems ......... Web: <http://www.dirtside.com/>

I think anybody looking for a be-all-end-all solution will find nothing but heartburn. different suites have different strong suits, and deciding you are going to pursue one and ignore all others may mean living without a feature or set of features you may find really useful or eventually necessary. but maintaining multiple complete NMSes isn’t really tenable either. all of that said, we use a combination of a couple. Nagios/Icinga because it’s been around forever (both in the world and in our network), and the power of script based checks, being able to write your own handlers and pretty much just leverage it as a framework you can shove questions into and get regular answers from is invaluable. LibreNMS gives us the best pretty pictures, letting us monitor much much more than just interface traffic, out of the box. much more than cacti is capable of without a ton of work (i.e. down to the tx/rx power and temperature readings of individual SFPs). it scales relatively well; at least in theory. i will be able to tell you for sure later this year as we are near the limits of what we can monitor with a single polling device. alerting out of Libre into Slack has proven quite fantastic. we can spawn threads attached to anything from a BGP peer dropping or a CPU alert as we move to triage and solve, even if we are in the field or meetings or whatever. we also still have cacti around for random one-offs. as great as Libre is, its poller can be a bit intense for some devices; so in those cases it’s safer for us to just have cacti graph the one or two OIDs we need specifically, without trolling all the other available sensors. we ran OpenNMS for a bit, but it proved way to dumb to maintain a large (and growing) complex network, without dedicating at least one or two people to the care and feeding of it. -nick — Nick Peelman Network Engineer | Enhanced Telecommunications Corp. 812-222-0169<tel:812-222-0169> | npeelman@etc1.net<mailto:npeelman@etc1.net> | www.etczone.com<http://www.etczone.com/> Sent from my iPhone On Aug 15, 2018, at 09:49, Colton Conor <colton.conor@gmail.com<mailto:colton.conor@gmail.com>> wrote: We are looking for a new network monitoring system. Since there are so many operators on this list, I would like to know which NMS do you use and why? Is there one that you really like, and others that you hate? For free options (opensouce), LibreNMS and NetXMS come highly recommended by many wireless ISPs on low budgets. However, I am not sure the commercial options available nor their price points.

Having done a full circle on the number of network monitoring packages, dealing with pro's and con's, we ended up with using Check_mk, moreover OMD.... http://omdisto.org We found (OMD) this to be a very powerful combination of different packages, each can shine for it's own strength and other compliments it for for the weaknesses ! Regards. Faisal Imtiaz Snappy Internet & Telecom http://www.snappytelecom.net Tel: 305 663 5518 x 232 Help-desk: (305)663-5518 Option 2 or Email: Support@Snappytelecom.net

From: "Colton Conor" <colton.conor@gmail.com> To: "nanog list" <nanog@nanog.org> Sent: Wednesday, August 15, 2018 9:49:12 AM Subject: What NMS do you use and why?

We are looking for a new network monitoring system. Since there are so many operators on this list, I would like to know which NMS do you use and why? Is there one that you really like, and others that you hate? For free options (opensouce), LibreNMS and NetXMS come highly recommended by many wireless ISPs on low budgets. However, I am not sure the commercial options available nor their price points.

Additionally mention: * https://www.centreon.com/en/solutions/centreon/ Related Tooling: * https://www.cyphon.io/ On Wed, Aug 15, 2018 at 8:51 AM Colton Conor <colton.conor@gmail.com> wrote:

We are looking for a new network monitoring system. Since there are so many operators on this list, I would like to know which NMS do you use and why? Is there one that you really like, and others that you hate?

For free options (opensouce), LibreNMS and NetXMS come highly recommended by many wireless ISPs on low budgets. However, I am not sure the commercial options available nor their price points.

-- - Andrew "lathama" Latham -