Monitoring the core network

rick827

rick827

rick827

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10 May 2007
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We have a country wide distribution of around 1000 branches which we monitor with Whats up gold, wasn't my choice but it’s what we have to work with. We're soon to be getting a refresh in the core network so I figure now is a good time to sort out a separate reliable real time solution primarily for the switch/router/server links etc. Monitoring services or any sort of discovery isn't really important. Ideally I’d like to stick an exploded map view on a plasma for a quick reference as to link status, throughput and alerts on any links dropping, error rates, response times etc

So, what do you use? :D
 
JFFNMS is what you need.

Linux experience will be required but once confirgured its a very powerful tool.

Netcool is also another good tool but wont give you nice charts but does act as effiective alerting sytem, especially handy if you have loads of links/routers etc that need monitoring, this is sun solaris based.
 
We have Nimbus as our monitoring platform, not without it's quirks and failings and it's a pig to configure but it's certainly powerful.
 
rick827 said:
We have a country wide distribution of around 1000 branches which we monitor with Whats up gold, wasn't my choice but it’s what we have to work with. We're soon to be getting a refresh in the core network so I figure now is a good time to sort out a separate reliable real time solution primarily for the switch/router/server links etc. Monitoring services or any sort of discovery isn't really important. Ideally I’d like to stick an exploded map view on a plasma for a quick reference as to link status, throughput and alerts on any links dropping, error rates, response times etc

So, what do you use? :D
Click to expand...

From the HP camp I would use NNMi (8). Though I'm biased being a HP Software guy :)

Anyway HP Network Node Manager I Series is worth a looksie on the HP website, probably the most "Enterprisey" solution on the market. NNM has a pretty big market share too. But its expensive.
 
Two open source solutions i'd look at are Nagios and Argus .

Nagios, will take a bit of work to configure but will certainly do what you need. For a 'Green is Good, Red is Bad' solution i'd look at Argus, less work for a simple set-up than Nagios, but probably not as powerful.
 
It all depends on what you want to achieve and what products and appliances you wish to monitor.

Then youll need to decide what you want to monitor and how you would achieve it, you want to use SNMP to monitor health, Netflow/Sflow to track application and bandwidth trends, ICMP to simply see when a device is unreachable or CDR logging for Voice QoS and MoS Score reporting. I quiet often use the Cisco IOS SLA feature for short term trending and analysis.

If your a Cisco house id want to use CiscoWorks LMS, if you a HP House then Openview might well be the recommended choice or even Insight Manager. You may even want to implement a hybrid solution for monitoring of both server hardware and network traffic.

There are an astronomical ammount of monitoring applications out there my recommendation would be to stay close to one that is vendor specific for the best results and which line up with your current/future hardware specifications.
 
has anyone used OpenNMS at all? We're pretty much in the same boat at the moment and looking for something that'll monitor and alert for a few hundred windows boxes as well as all networking gear.
 
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