This morning I went over our needs for a network monitoring
system. We've looked at a bunch of different commercial
setups, but they seem either pricey or not what we want, but
usually both. We've tenatively decided to roll our own.
Which may or may not be a good thing.
Our needs:
We need to monitor a variety of network devices including
upses, routers, switches, cmtses, dslams, terminal servers,
ds3 muxes, csus and other things like that. We need to be
able to look at cpu usuage, temperature, modems in use,
blah,
blah, blah. Then we need to monitor thresholds and be
notified when certain things happen. For example when a ds1
circuit zeros out or saturates.
My analysis:
Cricket/rrdtool could collect the data. We don't like rrd's
pruning techniques. We could pull the relevant data out of
the rrd data files and use it before it gets pruned.
Prior Art:
We've looked at netcool, nocol, and a couple others. I
really like netsaint which I found in the project section.
I've installed and I am playing. With some tweaking it
could do what I want it to do. I also need to hook up with
noc guys over at IU to see what they are doing. They've
tweaked the hell out of mrtg. We'll see. Netsaint, rules,
though.
We all need to think about burstable t1s. Monitoring and
billing.
In other news, I've decided to more fully develop the
linux
side of my notebook. It has become my central workstation.
I've needed to run windows because 3com's total control
manager and cable modem manager run in windows (although
wine seems to work more or less). Recent events have
changed my needs. I've rewritten the cable modem manager in
perl as a cgi, and we are mainly using as5300's rather than
total controls. And I am going to be doing more
developing. I've gotten used to securecrt and it keeping
track of all the places I need to telnet or ssh too.
Personal:
I think every 8 months I get antsy. For more than 10 years
I have either moved, changed schools, changed social groups
or changed jobs every 8 to 9 months. Now I am supposedly
all grown up. I am just passed 8 months in current job and
I need to buckle down. I think I am over the antsiness, at
least. Plus as my pal cdent says, I need to get in touch
with my inner geek. That stalwart lad that hiked through
the snow to the computer lab with dozens of disks to install
linux way back when. We'll see.