On Fri, 2010-02-26 at 09:55 +1100, Ken Foskey wrote: > http://www.cacti.net/ (Language PHP) > Cacti is a complete network graphing solution...
I found cacti to have a surprisingly steep learning curve, figuring out how the data sources and input methods and queries work. But it's a very very capable tool, and the interface is getting very nice and Web 2.0 in recent versions. Extending what you're graphing with cacti requires a reasonable understanding of SNMP and how net-snmpd works. But once you've overcome that you can monitor anything you can write a script for. It's pretty neat. > http://munin.projects.linpro.no/ (Language Perl) > Munin is a networked resource monitoring tool that can help analyze > resource trends and "what just happened to kill our performance?" > problems. It is designed to be very plug and play. A default > installation provides a lot of graphs with almost no work. The plugin architecture for munin is very flexible - spend half an hour going through the tutorial and it's very easy to start churning out graphs for anything you can think of. The fact that it relies on agent software running on the monitored device is a bit of a pain. I'm still having stability issues with the Windows agent, and pulling stats from devices that can't run an agent is a pain - munin's SNMP support is very weak. I've managed to get it to poll one of my ciscos, but it was a battle. Maybe I just haven't spent enough time working with it, but the web interface for munin is very sparse compared to the features available in cacti. > http://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg/ > The Multi Router Traffic Grapher Are people still using MRTG in new installations? I had the feeling it was kind of supplanted by other tools mentioned above. > http://support.nagios.com/knowledgebase > Cannot find a simple 'what is nagios' on website. > 'Nagios is a host and service monitor designed to inform you of network > problems.' From whitepaper. Everything else you've mentioned covers service performance. Nagios handles service availability and notifications only, and I consider it best-of-breed for this. > http://oss.oetiker.ch/smokeping/ > SmokePing keeps track of your network latency Also a big fan of this one. Does one thing only, and does it incredibly well. > Based on a quick read, munin looks pretty good. I would have serious reservations about deploying munin if you have more than a couple of SNMP-only devices, or more than a couple of critical Windows boxes. -- Pete -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
