Thanks for your comments. I was not planning on "rolling my own" NMS. Just writing a small app/script to handle the alerting. Basically anytime an alert happened WUG would run the app and pass it a set of arguments (info available to the notification). The program then would have my complicated set of rules that would tell it how to handle this particular alert. Thats all. My concern with the extra bandwidth is that I will be monitoring services in 2 locations, and there is already going to be a lot of trafic over the WAN, I would like to try and add as little as possible.
--Jared -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Brian W. Spolarich Sent: Wednesday, December 04, 2002 12:03 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [WhatsUp Forum] Alert notification Lights, Camera, Interaction! - IT wrote: > Thats been my feeling. I've been very happy with the program > otherwise. I've thought about building an alert system of my own just > to avoid doing that. I really don't want the extra network trafic. > Has anybody tried doing something like that? If so how? It's more > work then putting a duplicate copy of the network in, but it offers > more flexibility so . . . I agree its a deficiency in the program's object model, but I would avoid the temptation to "roll your own". If I understand your comments above, you're considering developing your own NMS vs. using WUG. Some thoughts: - Network monitoring and management applications are non-trivial, particularly beyond the simple "ping poller" architecture. I used to work for a large ISP (which shall remain nameless, but whose parent company's officers and directors are currently under investigation by the SEC :-), and we spent a lot of time dealing with the niceties of alert management, trap handling, etc. While WUG isn't perfect, it works pretty well and you could scale it with some work to support a fairly large network. - Writing software is hard. Writing software that works is harder. Writing software that works that someone else can maintain is particularly hard. Its also expensive, and it doesn't take many hours of loaded employee time (i.e. hourly wage plus benefits plus overhead, or contractor dollars) to equal the $1K or so you spent (or will spend) on WUG. I looked at cobbling together something w/ MRTG, Mon or BigBrother (or BigSister) and related tools, and realized that it would be a pain in the neck to manage (and I really don't want to worry about managing the management software) and would be annoying for someone else to maintain. - Worrying about a little bit of extra network traffic is I think suboptimizing the problem. I'd wonder if WUG was the right product for you if this is REALLY a problem for you. I can only imagine it would be if you're monitoring hundreds of devices, at which point you might want to purchase a more sophisticated and customizable NMS. My $0.02. Best regards, -bws Please visit http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html to be removed from this list. An Archive of this list is available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/whatsup_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ Please visit http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html to be removed from this list. An Archive of this list is available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/whatsup_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/
