Re: What NMS do you use and why?

[Andre van Zyl]

> 
> We run Iris - home-grown (South Africa), great support, small/nimble
> team that are able to fix issue, add features and give advice.
> 
> Very flexible, captures plenty of data out-the-box, supports a ton of
> vendors and data points, e.t.c.
> 
> It's a commercial solution, but not out of reach. Heck, even I can
> afford it :-).
> 
>     http://www.irisns.com/
> 
> We moved from a Cacti/SmokePing/Observium/Zabbix combo to Iris 2 years
> ago. Much happiness.
> 
> Mark.
> 

+1 for Iris.

We've been with them for a couple of years now, and the support has been first 
class - quick incident response, fast fixes, and very approachable regarding 
feature requests.

They are based out of Cape Town, South Africa, but also have a US presence in 
the DC area.

Andre.
  

Re: What NMS do you use and why?

[Jon Wolberg]

There are many other threads on this topic as well.  I can say +1 for
check_mk though.

On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 7:24 AM Faisal Imtiaz 
wrote:

> Having done a full circle on the number of network monitoring packages,
> dealing with pro's and con's, we ended up with  using Check_mk, moreover
> OMD http://omdisto.org
>
> We found (OMD) this to be a very powerful combination of different
> packages, each can shine for it's own strength and other compliments it for
> for the weaknesses !
>
> Regards.
>
> Faisal Imtiaz
> Snappy Internet & Telecom
> http://www.snappytelecom.net
>
> Tel: 305 663 5518 x 232
>
> Help-desk: (305)663-5518 Option 2 or Email: supp...@snappytelecom.net
>
> --
>
> *From: *"Colton Conor" 
> *To: *"nanog list" 
> *Sent: *Wednesday, August 15, 2018 9:49:12 AM
> *Subject: *What NMS do you use and why?
>
> We are looking for a new network monitoring system. Since there are so
> many operators on this list, I would like to know which NMS do you use and
> why? Is there one that you really like, and others that you hate?
> For free options (opensouce), LibreNMS and NetXMS come highly recommended
> by many wireless ISPs on low budgets. However, I am not sure the commercial
> options available nor their price points.
>
>

Re: What NMS do you use and why?

[Andrew Latham]

Additionally mention:
* https://www.centreon.com/en/solutions/centreon/

Related Tooling:
* https://www.cyphon.io/

On Wed, Aug 15, 2018 at 8:51 AM Colton Conor  wrote:

> We are looking for a new network monitoring system. Since there are so
> many operators on this list, I would like to know which NMS do you use and
> why? Is there one that you really like, and others that you hate?
>
> For free options (opensouce), LibreNMS and NetXMS come highly recommended
> by many wireless ISPs on low budgets. However, I am not sure the commercial
> options available nor their price points.
>
>
>

-- 
- Andrew "lathama" Latham -

Re: What NMS do you use and why?

[Faisal Imtiaz]

Having done a full circle on the number of network monitoring packages, dealing 
with pro's and con's, we ended up with using Check_mk, moreover OMD 
http://omdisto.org 

We found (OMD) this to be a very powerful combination of different packages, 
each can shine for it's own strength and other compliments it for for the 
weaknesses ! 

Regards. 

Faisal Imtiaz 
Snappy Internet & Telecom 
http://www.snappytelecom.net 

Tel: 305 663 5518 x 232 

Help-desk: (305)663-5518 Option 2 or Email: supp...@snappytelecom.net 

> From: "Colton Conor" 
> To: "nanog list" 
> Sent: Wednesday, August 15, 2018 9:49:12 AM
> Subject: What NMS do you use and why?

> We are looking for a new network monitoring system. Since there are so many
> operators on this list, I would like to know which NMS do you use and why? Is
> there one that you really like, and others that you hate?
> For free options (opensouce), LibreNMS and NetXMS come highly recommended by
> many wireless ISPs on low budgets. However, I am not sure the commercial
> options available nor their price points.

Re: What NMS do you use and why?

[Rich Brown]

> On Aug 17, 2018, at 8:00 AM, nanog-requ...@nanog.org wrote:
> 
> Message: 2
> Date: Wed, 15 Aug 2018 20:31:13 -0400 (EDT)
> From: Joe Loiacono mailto:jloia...@gmail.com>>
> To: William Herrin mailto:b...@herrin.us>>
> Cc: NANOG mailto:nanog@nanog.org>>, Colton Conor 
> mailto:colton.co...@gmail.com>>
> Subject: Re: What NMS do you use and why?
> Message-ID:
>   <593335944.184.1534379472982.JavaMail.jloia@DESKTOP-FDMC6S8>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
> 
> Consider also open-source FlowViewer for netflow capture and analysis. A lot 
> of very useful netflow based analytical tools in an easy UI. Sits on top of a 
> robust set of Carnegie-Mellon's high-capacity SiLK netflow tools.
> 
> https://sourceforge.net/projects/flowviewer/ 
> <https://sourceforge.net/projects/flowviewer/>
> 
> Joe

About a year ago, I was horsing around with Netflow tools. I built a Docker 
image to make it easy to install FlowViewer. I also factored the FlowViewer 
source files to make it easier to install in a Docker instance. I have no 
opinion whether Docker would be a good solution for a high performance Netflow 
collector. However, this Dockerfile makes it easy (~15 minutes) to get started 
with testing.

Grab the files from my github repo's:

https://github.com/richb-hanover/FlowViewer
https://github.com/richb-hanover/docker-silk-flowviewer

I also made a couple other Docker instances of Netflow tools. They're mentioned 
in my blog: http://richb-hanover.com/netflow-collectors-for-home-networks/

Enjoy!

Rich Brown
Blueberry Hill Software

Re: What NMS do you use and why?

[Nick W]

LibreNMS + Weathermap for graphs, real-time, and alerting. Vaping for a
simple Up/Degraded/Down dashboard (great replacement for
Multiping/PingPlotter on a TV). Elastiflow for netflow.

I really really want to like OpenNMS, and would love to use it daily; I
feel like it could handle many integrations well, but have never had the
time to dedicate to fully diving into it. I have used it in the past for
small setups (monitoring ~100 remotely managed routers/firewall) and it did
well, after getting past some learning curves. I keep coming back to it
every 6 months or so and trying the latest version.

On Wed, Aug 15, 2018 at 9:51 AM Colton Conor  wrote:

> We are looking for a new network monitoring system. Since there are so
> many operators on this list, I would like to know which NMS do you use and
> why? Is there one that you really like, and others that you hate?
>
> For free options (opensouce), LibreNMS and NetXMS come highly recommended
> by many wireless ISPs on low budgets. However, I am not sure the commercial
> options available nor their price points.
>
>
>

RE: What NMS do you use and why?

[Michael Braun (michbrau) via NANOG]

As open source tools go, Smokeping is a great tool to add to your NMS arsenal:

https://oss.oetiker.ch/smokeping/

Mike


On Wed, Aug 15, 2018 at 9:49 AM, Colton Conor 
mailto:colton.co...@gmail.com>> wrote:
We are looking for a new network monitoring system. Since there are so many 
operators on this list, I would like to know which NMS do you use and why?
Is there one that you really like, and others that you hate?

I still use a tool I wrote in perl nearly 20 years ago called "MrPing." MrPing 
handles multi-dependency graphs.

Re: What NMS do you use and why?

[Kushal]

Being a small business we like to use a mostly free and open source tools. Our 
networking monitoring stack presently looks like:

Simple Reachability Monitoring  (Ping) - uptimerobot.com

Just $4.5 per month for 50 monitors with 1 minute intervals (free if you are 
find with 5 minutes monitoring intervals). This is connected to our slack 
channel and also sends SMS when something goes offline.

Traffic & Device Monitoring - LibreNMS

A fork of Observium but adds the much needed alerting feature that observing 
only offers with it's paid plans. We use it to monitor switch port traffic, BGP 
sessions, device health, etc.

Packet Inspection or Flow Monitoring we use FastNetMon 
(https://fastnetmon.com/features/) the free edition is good for our needs. 


On August 16, 2018 at 9:16:42 PM, Nick Peelman (npeel...@etc1.net) wrote:

seconded. the pains of maintaining ELK are made worthwhile by this alone.  

-nick  

—  
Nick Peelman  
Network Engineer | Enhanced Telecommunications Corp.  
812-222-0169 | npeel...@etc1.net<mailto:npeel...@etc1.net> | 
www.etczone.com<http://www.etczone.com/>  

Sent from my iPhone  

On Aug 16, 2018, at 11:41, Stan Ouchakov 
mailto:st...@imaginesoftware.com>> wrote:  

Regarding netflow/sflow/ipfix monitoring, we had recently started using 
elastiflow by Robert Cowart. Scales very well with pretty visualizations. 
Cannot imagine what paid / supported version has to offer :)  

https://github.com/robcowart/elastiflow  



-Original Message-  
From: NANOG mailto:nanog-boun...@nanog.org>> On Behalf 
Of Joe Loiacono  
Sent: Wednesday, August 15, 2018 8:31 PM  
To: William Herrin mailto:b...@herrin.us>>  
Cc: NANOG mailto:nanog@nanog.org>>  
Subject: Re: What NMS do you use and why?  

Consider also open-source FlowViewer for netflow capture and analysis. A lot of 
very useful netflow based analytical tools in an easy UI. Sits on top of a 
robust set of Carnegie-Mellon's high-capacity SiLK netflow tools.  

https://sourceforge.net/projects/flowviewer/  

Joe  



- Original Message -  
From: "William Herrin" mailto:b...@herrin.us>>  
To: "Colton Conor" mailto:colton.co...@gmail.com>>  
Cc: "NANOG" mailto:nanog@nanog.org>>  
Sent: Wednesday, August 15, 2018 3:25:48 PM  
Subject: Re: What NMS do you use and why?  

On Wed, Aug 15, 2018 at 9:49 AM, Colton Conor 
mailto:colton.co...@gmail.com>> wrote:  
We are looking for a new network monitoring system. Since there are so  
many operators on this list, I would like to know which NMS do you use and why? 
 
Is there one that you really like, and others that you hate?  

I still use a tool I wrote in perl nearly 20 years ago called "MrPing." MrPing 
handles multi-dependency graphs.  

Consider:  

A is reachable via either B or C.  

If A and B are down but C is up, A being down is a separate failure from B 
being down. I need to know about both.  

If B and C are both down, A is unreachable. I don't want to receive alerts 
about A because they'll distract me from the root cause of the  
problem: that both B and C are down. The NMS should record that A is 
unreachable but it should also tell me that A being unreachable is a dependent 
failure that I can ignore until I fix the failures it depends on.  


The NMSes I've paid attention to either don't support dependencies well at all 
or support only simple hierarchical dependencies.  
Resilient, professional networks simply aren't built that way.  

Regards,  
Bill Herrin  


--  
William Herrin  her...@dirtside.com<mailto:her...@dirtside.com> 
b...@herrin.us<mailto:b...@herrin.us> Dirtside Systems . Web: 
<http://www.dirtside.com/>  

Re: What NMS do you use and why?

[Nick Peelman]

seconded.  the pains of maintaining ELK are made worthwhile by this alone.

-nick

—
Nick Peelman
Network Engineer | Enhanced Telecommunications Corp.
812-222-0169 | npeel...@etc1.net<mailto:npeel...@etc1.net> | 
www.etczone.com<http://www.etczone.com/>

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 16, 2018, at 11:41, Stan Ouchakov 
mailto:st...@imaginesoftware.com>> wrote:

Regarding netflow/sflow/ipfix monitoring, we had recently started using 
elastiflow by Robert Cowart. Scales very well with pretty visualizations. 
Cannot imagine what paid / supported version has to offer :)

https://github.com/robcowart/elastiflow



-Original Message-
From: NANOG mailto:nanog-boun...@nanog.org>> On Behalf 
Of Joe Loiacono
Sent: Wednesday, August 15, 2018 8:31 PM
To: William Herrin mailto:b...@herrin.us>>
Cc: NANOG mailto:nanog@nanog.org>>
Subject: Re: What NMS do you use and why?

Consider also open-source FlowViewer for netflow capture and analysis. A lot of 
very useful netflow based analytical tools in an easy UI. Sits on top of a 
robust set of Carnegie-Mellon's high-capacity SiLK netflow tools.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/flowviewer/

Joe



- Original Message -
From: "William Herrin" mailto:b...@herrin.us>>
To: "Colton Conor" mailto:colton.co...@gmail.com>>
Cc: "NANOG" mailto:nanog@nanog.org>>
Sent: Wednesday, August 15, 2018 3:25:48 PM
Subject: Re: What NMS do you use and why?

On Wed, Aug 15, 2018 at 9:49 AM, Colton Conor 
mailto:colton.co...@gmail.com>> wrote:
We are looking for a new network monitoring system. Since there are so
many operators on this list, I would like to know which NMS do you use and why?
Is there one that you really like, and others that you hate?

I still use a tool I wrote in perl nearly 20 years ago called "MrPing." MrPing 
handles multi-dependency graphs.

Consider:

A is reachable via either B or C.

If A and B are down but C is up, A being down is a separate failure from B 
being down. I need to know about both.

If B and C are both down, A is unreachable. I don't want to receive alerts 
about A because they'll distract me from the root cause of the
problem: that both B and C are down. The NMS should record that A is 
unreachable but it should also tell me that A being unreachable is a dependent 
failure that I can ignore until I fix the failures it depends on.


The NMSes I've paid attention to either don't support dependencies well at all 
or support only simple hierarchical dependencies.
Resilient, professional networks simply aren't built that way.

Regards,
Bill Herrin


--
William Herrin  her...@dirtside.com<mailto:her...@dirtside.com> 
 b...@herrin.us<mailto:b...@herrin.us> Dirtside Systems . Web: 
<http://www.dirtside.com/>

RE: What NMS do you use and why?

[Stan Ouchakov]

Regarding netflow/sflow/ipfix monitoring, we had recently started using 
elastiflow by Robert Cowart. Scales very well with pretty visualizations. 
Cannot imagine what paid / supported version has to offer :)

https://github.com/robcowart/elastiflow



-Original Message-
From: NANOG  On Behalf Of Joe Loiacono
Sent: Wednesday, August 15, 2018 8:31 PM
To: William Herrin 
Cc: NANOG 
Subject: Re: What NMS do you use and why?

Consider also open-source FlowViewer for netflow capture and analysis. A lot of 
very useful netflow based analytical tools in an easy UI. Sits on top of a 
robust set of Carnegie-Mellon's high-capacity SiLK netflow tools.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/flowviewer/

Joe



- Original Message -
From: "William Herrin" 
To: "Colton Conor" 
Cc: "NANOG" 
Sent: Wednesday, August 15, 2018 3:25:48 PM
Subject: Re: What NMS do you use and why?

On Wed, Aug 15, 2018 at 9:49 AM, Colton Conor  wrote:
> We are looking for a new network monitoring system. Since there are so 
> many operators on this list, I would like to know which NMS do you use and 
> why?
> Is there one that you really like, and others that you hate?

I still use a tool I wrote in perl nearly 20 years ago called "MrPing." MrPing 
handles multi-dependency graphs.

Consider:

A is reachable via either B or C.

If A and B are down but C is up, A being down is a separate failure from B 
being down. I need to know about both.

If B and C are both down, A is unreachable. I don't want to receive alerts 
about A because they'll distract me from the root cause of the
problem: that both B and C are down. The NMS should record that A is 
unreachable but it should also tell me that A being unreachable is a dependent 
failure that I can ignore until I fix the failures it depends on.


The NMSes I've paid attention to either don't support dependencies well at all 
or support only simple hierarchical dependencies.
Resilient, professional networks simply aren't built that way.

Regards,
Bill Herrin


--
William Herrin  her...@dirtside.com  b...@herrin.us Dirtside 
Systems . Web: <http://www.dirtside.com/>

Re: What NMS do you use and why?

[Joe Loiacono]

Consider also open-source FlowViewer for netflow capture and analysis. A lot of 
very useful netflow based analytical tools in an easy UI. Sits on top of a 
robust set of Carnegie-Mellon's high-capacity SiLK netflow tools.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/flowviewer/

Joe



- Original Message -
From: "William Herrin" 
To: "Colton Conor" 
Cc: "NANOG" 
Sent: Wednesday, August 15, 2018 3:25:48 PM
Subject: Re: What NMS do you use and why?

On Wed, Aug 15, 2018 at 9:49 AM, Colton Conor  wrote:
> We are looking for a new network monitoring system. Since there are so many
> operators on this list, I would like to know which NMS do you use and why?
> Is there one that you really like, and others that you hate?

I still use a tool I wrote in perl nearly 20 years ago called
"MrPing." MrPing handles multi-dependency graphs.

Consider:

A is reachable via either B or C.

If A and B are down but C is up, A being down is a separate failure
from B being down. I need to know about both.

If B and C are both down, A is unreachable. I don't want to receive
alerts about A because they'll distract me from the root cause of the
problem: that both B and C are down. The NMS should record that A is
unreachable but it should also tell me that A being unreachable is a
dependent failure that I can ignore until I fix the failures it
depends on.


The NMSes I've paid attention to either don't support dependencies
well at all or support only simple hierarchical dependencies.
Resilient, professional networks simply aren't built that way.

Regards,
Bill Herrin


-- 
William Herrin  her...@dirtside.com  b...@herrin.us
Dirtside Systems . Web: <http://www.dirtside.com/>

Re: What NMS do you use and why?

[Nick Peelman]

I think anybody looking for a be-all-end-all solution will find nothing but 
heartburn.

different suites have different strong suits, and deciding you are going to 
pursue one and ignore all others may mean living without a feature or set of 
features you may find really useful or eventually necessary. but maintaining 
multiple complete NMSes isn’t really tenable either.

all of that said, we use a combination of a couple. Nagios/Icinga because it’s 
been around forever (both in the world and in our network), and the power of 
script based checks, being able to write your own handlers and pretty much just 
leverage it as a framework you can shove questions into and get regular answers 
from is invaluable.

LibreNMS gives us the best pretty pictures, letting us monitor much much more 
than just interface traffic, out of the box. much more than cacti is capable of 
without a ton of work (i.e. down to the tx/rx power and temperature readings of 
individual SFPs). it scales relatively well; at least in theory. i will be able 
to tell you for sure later this year as we are near the limits of what we can 
monitor with a single polling device. alerting out of Libre into Slack has 
proven quite fantastic. we can spawn threads attached to anything from a BGP 
peer dropping or a CPU alert as we move to triage and solve, even if we are in 
the field or meetings or whatever.

we also still have cacti around for random one-offs. as great as Libre is, its 
poller can be a bit intense for some devices; so in those cases it’s safer for 
us to just have cacti graph the one or two OIDs we need specifically, without 
trolling all the other available sensors.

we ran OpenNMS for a bit, but it proved way to dumb to maintain a large (and 
growing) complex network, without dedicating at least one or two people to the 
care and feeding of it.

-nick

—
Nick Peelman
Network Engineer | Enhanced Telecommunications Corp.
812-222-0169 | npeel...@etc1.net | 
www.etczone.com

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 15, 2018, at 09:49, Colton Conor 
mailto:colton.co...@gmail.com>> wrote:

We are looking for a new network monitoring system. Since there are so many 
operators on this list, I would like to know which NMS do you use and why? Is 
there one that you really like, and others that you hate?

For free options (opensouce), LibreNMS and NetXMS come highly recommended by 
many wireless ISPs on low budgets. However, I am not sure the commercial 
options available nor their price points.

Re: What NMS do you use and why?

[William Herrin]

On Wed, Aug 15, 2018 at 9:49 AM, Colton Conor  wrote:
> We are looking for a new network monitoring system. Since there are so many
> operators on this list, I would like to know which NMS do you use and why?
> Is there one that you really like, and others that you hate?

I still use a tool I wrote in perl nearly 20 years ago called
"MrPing." MrPing handles multi-dependency graphs.

Consider:

A is reachable via either B or C.

If A and B are down but C is up, A being down is a separate failure
from B being down. I need to know about both.

If B and C are both down, A is unreachable. I don't want to receive
alerts about A because they'll distract me from the root cause of the
problem: that both B and C are down. The NMS should record that A is
unreachable but it should also tell me that A being unreachable is a
dependent failure that I can ignore until I fix the failures it
depends on.


The NMSes I've paid attention to either don't support dependencies
well at all or support only simple hierarchical dependencies.
Resilient, professional networks simply aren't built that way.

Regards,
Bill Herrin


-- 
William Herrin  her...@dirtside.com  b...@herrin.us
Dirtside Systems . Web: 

Re: What NMS do you use and why?

[Peter Harrison]

As a small operator, we mainly use Icinga for the reasons Chuck mentioned.

The API allows us to do updates based on configuration parameters we've
created in a custom MySQL database.


Peter

Peter Harrison
CTO, Colovore LLC

On Wed, Aug 15, 2018 at 9:19 AM, Chuck Anderson  wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 15, 2018 at 08:49:12AM -0500, Colton Conor wrote:
> > We are looking for a new network monitoring system. Since there are so
> many
> > operators on this list, I would like to know which NMS do you use and
> why?
> > Is there one that you really like, and others that you hate?
> >
> > For free options (opensouce), LibreNMS and NetXMS come highly recommended
> > by many wireless ISPs on low budgets. However, I am not sure the
> commercial
> > options available nor their price points.
>
> For monitoring network device/interface data plane reachability with
> ping, we are still using an ancient piece of open source software
> called Autostatus.  I find it invaluable for notifying us about
> reachability issues with it's simple to understand parent/child
> relationships and graph-based fping methodology.  It isn't perfect--it
> doesn't scale very well, it doesn't have HA/clustering, it has no
> fancy dependencies (just basic parent-child) and no event correlation,
> no contact scheduling, no API, etc. but it is very easy to understand
> why you are getting an alert or not and boiling that down to a single
> point of failure and as such it provides reliable, trustable
> information about data plane reachability from one vantage point on
> the network.
>
> For monitoring server & network service availability,
> device/environmental health, etc. we are currently using Nagios.  My
> problems with it are that it has complex rules for how/when to perform
> a specific health check and send or suppress a notification (and
> perhaps bugs in our old version that never ever seems to send any Host
> notifications except when it does) and the whole idea of "suppress the
> Host check unless all Service checks for all services on the host are
> down" doesn't really fit well with the idea of monitoring
> device/interface reachability on routers & switches that make up a
> complex graph of dependencies.  Trying to shoehorn Nagios into
> alerting on just the one IP address/device/interface that is causing
> all the others behind it to be unreachable doesn't work very well.
> You can't use Host Depenencies because Host checks are suppressed by
> default, and Host Dependencies don't affect Service
> Checks/notifications.  Forcing Host checks to always run causes
> performance problems.  Creating a "Ping" service for every host
> requires creating manual Service Dependencies between all the "Ping"
> services on every Host.  Then you end up with a complex configuration
> that is very hard to understand.  But for things like telling you when
> a power supply or fan has died, or if the web service crashed, it
> works well.
>
> We did a survey of a bunch of open source tools to replace Nagios and
> have settled on Icinga for it's APIs, dynamic rules with pattern
> matching and boolean logic, and compatibility with Nagios plugins.
> But it still doesn't change the basic architectural choices of the
> Nagios core engine and hence isn't a good fit for network
> device/interface reachability monitoring IMO.
>

Re: What NMS do you use and why?

[Chuck Anderson]

On Wed, Aug 15, 2018 at 08:49:12AM -0500, Colton Conor wrote:
> We are looking for a new network monitoring system. Since there are so many
> operators on this list, I would like to know which NMS do you use and why?
> Is there one that you really like, and others that you hate?
> 
> For free options (opensouce), LibreNMS and NetXMS come highly recommended
> by many wireless ISPs on low budgets. However, I am not sure the commercial
> options available nor their price points.

Part 2 (see Part 1 for my epistles on Autostatus & Nagios).

To complement Autostatus and Nagios and to replace our ancient Cricket
SNMP graphing/trending solution, several years ago we had adopted
Statseeker.

We've now replaced that with AKiPS, which I highly recommend.  It does
your basic 1 minute SNMP graphing, but it also collects SNMP Traps &
Syslog feeds and can alert on custom matches & events as well as host
down via ping.  Its main feature is its comprehensive vendor MIB
support--it supports almost every vendor's device we use out of the
box with no special configuration.  They are constantly adding support
for new vendors/devices and they are pretty responsive to adding new
ones.  AKiPS' weakness is in alerting--it makes no attempt at
depenencies or event correlation, so you can get flooded with events.

Re: What NMS do you use and why?

[Mel Beckman]

I run OpenNMS currently, and the one problem I have is it's very peculiar -- 
one might say academic -- terminology and structure. It's not a point-and-click 
interface, despite being web-based. Instead, you must wrangle with pollers and 
responders and notifiers. Eventually I got my head around it, but it's still 
pretty painful to use.


I run a mix of Cactus, Intermapper, and PRTG, with PRTG a very nice commercial 
product that offers a free version supporting up to 100 sensors.


  -mel


From: NANOG  on behalf of Daniel Lacey 

Sent: Wednesday, August 15, 2018 10:04:59 AM
To: nanog@nanog.org
Subject: Re: What NMS do you use and why?

Take a look at opennms.org
Scales very well. Lots of API hooks for integration with other data
sources and applications.
It is open source and they offer paid support services, one-time (e.g.
setup and training) or on-going support contracts.

On 8/15/18 7:49 AM, Colton Conor wrote:
> We are looking for a new network monitoring system. Since there are so
> many operators on this list, I would like to know which NMS do you use
> and why? Is there one that you really like, and others that you hate?
>
> For free options (opensouce), LibreNMS and NetXMS come highly
> recommended by many wireless ISPs on low budgets. However, I am not
> sure the commercial options available nor their price points.
>
>

Re: What NMS do you use and why?

[Daniel Lacey]

Take a look at opennms.org
Scales very well. Lots of API hooks for integration with other data
sources and applications.
It is open source and they offer paid support services, one-time (e.g.
setup and training) or on-going support contracts.

On 8/15/18 7:49 AM, Colton Conor wrote:
> We are looking for a new network monitoring system. Since there are so
> many operators on this list, I would like to know which NMS do you use
> and why? Is there one that you really like, and others that you hate? 
>
> For free options (opensouce), LibreNMS and NetXMS come highly
> recommended by many wireless ISPs on low budgets. However, I am not
> sure the commercial options available nor their price points.
>
>

Re: What NMS do you use and why?

[Jason Lixfeld]

(resending with really, really the correct from:)

Here’s a snapshot of what tends to work for me, along with my $0.02 of thoughts:

- Observium handles polling, graphing and alerting for SNMP exposed objects on 
network devices,
- I feel that a visual representation of the physical network topology is 
extremely helpful for many aspects of day-to-day operations, so InterMapper 
handles that,
- Syslog and SNMPTRAP collection, correlation and alerting is handled by Splunk,
- Netflow collection and graphing is handled by nfsen,
- Smokeping for what smokeping does (but I just discovered vaping this morning, 
which looks awesome and will get some love).

I believe that LibraNMS has at some capability to use more robust graphing 
engines, which for me would be great; I find rrd is a little limiting these 
days.  I think it also has (better?) support for weathermap, so I could 
technically replace InterMapper with weathermap and collapse the tool chain a 
bit.

With streaming telemetry becoming more of a thing, there will definitely be a 
shift away from SNMP for things that are polled for statistics.

There are interesting Netflow tools like Elastiflow and pmacct that are more 
robust than nfsen.  The latter has a ton of functionality that can produce some 
interesting data for purposes of traffic engineering, among other things.  The 
former uses ELK so it’s inherently gorgeous and fast, but it requires a ton of 
resources depending on the number of flows/sec that you’re collecting.

Hope that helps.

Sent from my iPhone

> On Aug 15, 2018, at 9:49 AM, Colton Conor  wrote:
> 
> We are looking for a new network monitoring system. Since there are so many 
> operators on this list, I would like to know which NMS do you use and why? Is 
> there one that you really like, and others that you hate? 
> 
> For free options (opensouce), LibreNMS and NetXMS come highly recommended by 
> many wireless ISPs on low budgets. However, I am not sure the commercial 
> options available nor their price points.
> 
> 

Re: What NMS do you use and why?

[Chuck Anderson]

On Wed, Aug 15, 2018 at 08:49:12AM -0500, Colton Conor wrote:
> We are looking for a new network monitoring system. Since there are so many
> operators on this list, I would like to know which NMS do you use and why?
> Is there one that you really like, and others that you hate?
> 
> For free options (opensouce), LibreNMS and NetXMS come highly recommended
> by many wireless ISPs on low budgets. However, I am not sure the commercial
> options available nor their price points.

For monitoring network device/interface data plane reachability with
ping, we are still using an ancient piece of open source software
called Autostatus.  I find it invaluable for notifying us about
reachability issues with it's simple to understand parent/child
relationships and graph-based fping methodology.  It isn't perfect--it
doesn't scale very well, it doesn't have HA/clustering, it has no
fancy dependencies (just basic parent-child) and no event correlation,
no contact scheduling, no API, etc. but it is very easy to understand
why you are getting an alert or not and boiling that down to a single
point of failure and as such it provides reliable, trustable
information about data plane reachability from one vantage point on
the network.

For monitoring server & network service availability,
device/environmental health, etc. we are currently using Nagios.  My
problems with it are that it has complex rules for how/when to perform
a specific health check and send or suppress a notification (and
perhaps bugs in our old version that never ever seems to send any Host
notifications except when it does) and the whole idea of "suppress the
Host check unless all Service checks for all services on the host are
down" doesn't really fit well with the idea of monitoring
device/interface reachability on routers & switches that make up a
complex graph of dependencies.  Trying to shoehorn Nagios into
alerting on just the one IP address/device/interface that is causing
all the others behind it to be unreachable doesn't work very well.
You can't use Host Depenencies because Host checks are suppressed by
default, and Host Dependencies don't affect Service
Checks/notifications.  Forcing Host checks to always run causes
performance problems.  Creating a "Ping" service for every host
requires creating manual Service Dependencies between all the "Ping"
services on every Host.  Then you end up with a complex configuration
that is very hard to understand.  But for things like telling you when
a power supply or fan has died, or if the web service crashed, it
works well.

We did a survey of a bunch of open source tools to replace Nagios and
have settled on Icinga for it's APIs, dynamic rules with pattern
matching and boolean logic, and compatibility with Nagios plugins.
But it still doesn't change the basic architectural choices of the
Nagios core engine and hence isn't a good fit for network
device/interface reachability monitoring IMO.