Enterprise-grade Network Monitoring

DRZ

DRZ

DRZ

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Hi,

I'm fishing for people's experiences monitoring larger networks. I know the default go-to is usually Nagios but I'm looking for alternatives. SolarWinds is already an option I have to me but alternatives are always good to explore.

I'm looking to monitor approximately 100-150 switches/routers/firewalls across 22 sites. I want to see everything that is going on, so router/switch status, hardware issues, port utilisation, NetFlow data etc. An interface to then auto-launch the correct management tool for that device (Be that PuTTY or ASDM or whatever) would be great too.

Other nice-to-haves would be automated configuration backups, syslog type functionality for off-device read-only logging etc.

Suggest away or ask me more questions if you need to :)
 
What brand of switches?

I presume you're not using 3Com/HP since you mention NetFlow (as opposed to sFlow..), but HP Intelligent Management Center does all that

Be prepared to get your cheque book out, though

PRTG is also worth a good, it's a cracking tool, though not as extensive.

The SolarWinds tools are really good from what I have seen. I wasn't keen at first, but I have done some proper trials and I've been impressed with the Configuration Management and Performance Management plugins.

You can of course do a lot of this with open source, but it would involve lots of tools and little commonality accross functions.

If you are looking to extend Nagios and add a nicer front end, check out Check_MK - it's excellent. Also check out Nagios XI - it adds a lot more ease of management and features over Nagios core (eg native Exchange monitoring, WMI support, etc)
 
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Solarwinds for us. 350+ switches and routers, displaced a long standing implementation of Ciscoworks LMS, only thing it doesnt do is wireless very well, so I've got the new Cisco Prime for that, but despite being licensed to cover the wired network the chaps still prefer Solarwinds.
 
SolarWinds is the best by far but it's super expensive once you license for all the interfaces as well as any modules like netflow, configuration manager, etc. Forpure network monitoring it'd be my first choice.

As a budget alternative the ManageEngine OpManager is pretty good. It's actually a little better then Orion for the server/exhange type monitoring but not as good on the network side of things so maybe not ideal for you. Still it's only about 10% of the price!
 
We use PRTG mainly because its quite cheap, very easy to use and setup but as Hulkster said, I think it will be a little bit basic for what you want.
 
I'm not sure exactly what modules I've got for SolarWinds if I'm honest. I know we have NetFlow and a few other bits and bobs, but I guess I'm going to need to get into depth with it if it is the most powerful/best out there.

Almost entirely Cisco out there at the moment, some Foundry though but I'm not too worried about that mid to long term. Thinking on, 150 is probably understating the case somewhat. I typed the OP without thinking in depth and 150 probably isn't even half of the devices I'd want to monitor.
 
We use Solarwinds Orion/NCM for 500 - 1000 devices at the moment. Blinding bit of software if you have the money; the support is excellent

- GP
 
DRZ said:
I'm looking to monitor approximately 100-150 switches/routers/firewalls across 22 sites. I want to see everything that is going on, so router/switch status, hardware issues, port utilisation, NetFlow data etc. An interface to then auto-launch the correct management tool for that device (Be that PuTTY or ASDM or whatever) would be great too.
Click to expand...

The Solarwinds NPM/NCM/NTA modules will pretty much cover you for this. It's pretty quick to get up and running with basic monitoring, although once you start getting beyond simple interface/box up/down alerts it takes a bit more config & development to get things working properly, although this is true of pretty much every product out there. One of the really good things about Solarwinds is that they are pretty keen and open at integrating development requests into the product, and also push regular updates as well. I run it to manage an 800 node Cisco network and it handles things like IOS upgrades, global config changes, regular config backups (and restores if needed) with ease, plus syslog and alerting etc.

A couple of things to watch though - it's a monster for resources, so make sure you spec a few very "beefy" servers to run it (the minimum requirements are a "tad" optimistic ;) ). Also the annual maintenance isn't cheap, however the regular updates sort of make up for this, they don't just take the money and do sweet FA in terms of developing it.

If you've got any specific questions feel free to ask :)
 
Heh.. we use solar winds for our core devices, and nagios/cacti for customers. Use rancid for config backups, and splunk/syslogd (with logwatch) for sysloging.

But mostly we have a custom built website that shows us when hosts are down/up, as that is all most people want to know.
 
Hulkster, we use (and i say we lightly, the team use, i pay! :D):

Solarwinds NPM SLX (Unlimited Nodes) (have an additional polling engine to run it on 2 beefy servers - dual processor 32Gb memory - also)
Solarwinds NCM
Solarwinds APM
Solarwinds Virtualisation Manager
 
Check out Opsview, I joined them about 4-5 weeks- lots of funky stuff but running on-top of nagios underneath. Fairly cheap too (will cost you a % of Solarwinds (at a guess)).
 
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I recommend prtg but I have never used it to monitor anything over 100 user site.

But they are apparently able to do multisite set ups.

solarwinds is meant to be the best from what I have heard but also very expensive.

Another one for virtual infrastructure is veeam one. Although not what you asked for thought i would mention it anyway.
 
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