Network Monitoring Tools For Unix?

drexle asks: "I work for a city government supporting the various WAN's and LAN's used throughout the city by the police, fire department, etc. Currently, we are using an application on a HP-UX system on its last legs to monitor the status of the various routers, switches, etc., throughout the city, and basically just pages someone if something goes really wrong. Are there any good tools to do this available for a Linux/*BSD platform? Preferably with some sort of GUI which can display an organizational map of the network? Most of the routers/switches are from Cisco, w/ various other equipment used for the WAN connections(microwave, T1's, ...) "

Check out OpenNMS

[Jesse Becker]

Have a look at the OpenNMS [opennms.org] project. It looks to be very close to what you are looking for. I recently heard Steve Giles, one of their lead technical people, give a presentation at the local LUG meeting, and I was quite impressed.

Network Monitoring on Linux I have done..

[ReD-MaN]

I have used both GxSnmp (http://www.gxsnmp.org) and Computer Associates Unicentre TNG (http://www.cai.com) Framework on Linux for Monitoring client networks.

Unicentre is much easier to setup then GXSNMP, but either one is good.

I also added on to them a package called Telalert to do paging etc, when nodes go down. (http://www.telamon.com)

Kickass Not-to-Expensive Software

[HackHackBoom]

I used to use something called What-Up Gold by IP-Switch. Its an awesome network monitoring software package that can do fun things like page your cell phone and e-mail you when stuff doesn't stay up, it has a really good logging system and is basically very well configurable. http://www.ipswitch.com


"It's not stealing if you don't get caught!"

MRTG

[eufaula]

MRTG has been around for awhile. As far as management, not much it can do there. But for general graphing and stats, its pretty nice. Requires perl, a webserver, and a C complier. setup is fairly simple through one file. We use it to chart all of the switches, servers and routers on our campus...Does a nice job. and its running on a 486/dx2-66

just my $0.02

matt

Big Brother

[GW Hayduke]

I use both MRTG and Big Brother [bb4.com] for different situations and circumstances... Big Brother is pretty easy to setup and it's pages (Both Web and pager/email/call-you-in-the-middle-of-the-night-an d-piss-off-your-wife functions work almost too well :) ) MRTG has it beat hands down though as far as reporting graphs of utilization though

Basic System Monitoring

[retep]

Disclaimer: I wrote ESM.

For basic system monitoring there is ESM. [tripod.com] It's easilly customizable so you could extend it to do what you want to do by writing your own plugins for it. Unfortunatly it's also pretty primitive and simple so there is no GUI or centralized control.

NetSaint - Free, easy to use, and powerful

[tmoyer]

http://www.netsaint.org [netaint.org]

I just set up NetSaint this morning to monitor some servers, and I am really impressed with it. It took me less than 2 hours to set up to monitor an entire network, and that included reading the (very good) documentation.

You can monitor ping results, system loads, disk space, users, zombine processes, HTTP, PostgreSQL, etc. etc. etc. on Linux/other UNIX boxes, Windows boxes, and printers. The results can be viewed from the command line, or through CGI scripts. The CGI scripts show network status maps (all your servers at once) and can even show them using VRML! This thing is awesome! Alerts can be sent via e-mail or pagers.

There's also an article about setting up NetSaint in Byte:

http://www.byte.com/column/BYT19990728S0008 [byte.com]

List of the best...

[Mr_Person]

Check out this website [opensec.net]. It has a list of ~20 apps that will do what you want. While you're at it, check out the rest of the site, it has some pretty neat network utilities.

Visio Enterprise for diagramming

[lil_billy]

I know it's not *nix-based, but you might check out Visio Enterprise 2000 for some pretty kickass LAN/WAN documentation in a manager-friendly format.
You get a SQL db full of network data when using it's AutoDiscovery and Layout tool.
...
-LB

Re:MRTG

[subsolar2]

Cricket is kinda the son of MRTG and is available from http://cricket.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]. I've been planning on implementing it at our network because it can monitor availablity of services and other cool things.

Check it out and see if it fits your application

subsolar

Lithium

[XoXus]

A friend of mine wrote quite a nice package called Lithium that has a GTK GUI, and it sounds like it'd probably fit what you want. I couldn't find it anywhere (seems to have disappeared), but the author is James Wilson.

Use a search engine instead of wasting our time

[Anonymous Coward]

Big Brother System and Network Monitor [bb4.com] NetSaint Network Monitor [netsaint.org] Network Monitor, Network Sniffer, Sniffer, IP Sniffer [distinct.com] The Angel Network Monitor [paganini.net] IPTraf - An IP Network Monitor [mozcom.com] Chesapeake's Network Monitor [ccci.com] BigBen: Network Monitor Utility LG #28 [linuxgazette.com] ATM Network Monitor [uni-karlsruhe.de] >> Brought to you by Google [google.com]!

Re: Big Brother -- I Second MRTG

[InitZero]

My company spent over $75,000 on OpenView plus training. Within two years we dropped it in favor of MRTG [ee-staff.ethz.ch] .

MRTG is one of the most flexiable, easy to use (not so easy to setup) monitoring tools around. It doesn't do notification but that's what Big Brother is for.

I give the combination two thumbs up.

InitZero