Network inventory and configuration tracking tools
How about an operations oriented question. What is the current preferences amoung network operators for network inventory and configuration management tools? Not so much status monitoring (up, down) but other stuff network operator wants to know like circuit IDs (how many IDs can a circuit have?), network contacts, design layout reports (layer 1/2/3), what's supposed to be connected to that port? The stuff you can't get out of the box itself. Most ISPs seem to end up with a combination of homegrown systems, opensource, and commercial products. The commercial "integrated" systems have lots of stuff, and according to the vendors can do anything including splice fiber. CiscoWorks www.cisco.com Netcracker www.netcracker.com NetView www.tivoli.com Openview www.hp.com VitalQIP www.qip.lucent.com Visionael www.visionael.com
Hello Sean - Could I suggest you add Nets to the list you show below? Nets is commercial software (from the same people who wrote the Radiator radius server), and like Radiator is delivered in source code form. There is complete support for extending the existing set of objects and documented API's for adding functionality. Nets is written in Perl and runs on pretty much any platform and any SQL database. Here is the URL if you are interested: http://www.open.com.au/nets regards Hugh On Thursday, August 8, 2002, at 01:09 PM, Sean Donelan wrote:
How about an operations oriented question. What is the current preferences amoung network operators for network inventory and configuration management tools? Not so much status monitoring (up, down) but other stuff network operator wants to know like circuit IDs (how many IDs can a circuit have?), network contacts, design layout reports (layer 1/2/3), what's supposed to be connected to that port? The stuff you can't get out of the box itself.
Most ISPs seem to end up with a combination of homegrown systems, opensource, and commercial products. The commercial "integrated" systems have lots of stuff, and according to the vendors can do anything including splice fiber.
CiscoWorks www.cisco.com Netcracker www.netcracker.com NetView www.tivoli.com Openview www.hp.com VitalQIP www.qip.lucent.com Visionael www.visionael.com
-- Radiator: the most portable, flexible and configurable RADIUS server anywhere. Available on *NIX, *BSD, Windows 95/98/2000, NT, MacOS X. - Nets: internetwork inventory and management - graphical, extensible, flexible with hardware, software, platform and database independence.
I and the interesting experience watching an overzealous VP in charge of "Project Capture" implement some of these tools for tracking, inventory, and cross-referencing.... The final solution, for all but configuration management, was (as Hugh mentioned) Nets. It was the most configurable and dynamic. But here you're not looking at an "out-of-the-box solution, and if the network is large enough, you'll require a small team of people to run it. Personally, I like a simple CVS system for config files, a separate system. <fighting urge to go on pro-opensource rant> There are several quality commercial products out there. Lucent for example, in their Vital* platform, does do everything but cook you breakfast, but for the price should. Adding to the list for IP Allocation and DNS management would be NameSurfer by Nixu. -- sig=$header
On Wed, 7 Aug 2002, Sean Donelan wrote:
How about an operations oriented question. What is the current preferences amoung network operators for network inventory and configuration management tools? Not so much status monitoring (up, down) but other stuff network operator wants to know like circuit IDs (how many IDs can a circuit have?), network contacts, design layout reports (layer 1/2/3), what's supposed to be connected to that port? The stuff you can't get out of the box itself.
Most ISPs seem to end up with a combination of homegrown systems, opensource, and commercial products. The commercial "integrated" systems have lots of stuff, and according to the vendors can do anything including splice fiber.
We ended up in large part developing our own tools in-house. One is an SQL database to store and link network elements (routers, interfaces/ports, circuits, IP addresses, contacts, etc) with hooks into other internal databases and other outward-facing applications, such as our rwhois server. Another is a tool that polls our network devices once every few hours and backs up their configuration into an RCS filestore so we have journaling capabilities. We do use some commercial tools, but those are mainly for customer presentation (VitalSuite) and up/down reporting and event correlation (Netcool). jms
participants (4)
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Hugh Irvine -
jnull -
Sean Donelan -
Streiner, Justin