It is my intent to list all the Open Source tools that I have either found usefull or at least know about…
Network Management Systems – Features would include Network Up/Down Monitoring, Network Health, Interface Traffic Statistics
- NMIS – http://www.sins.com.au/nmis/I personally use this in a very large scale network with several hundred Cisco Switches and Routers. I simpily cannot say enough about this system.
Summary: NMIS is perl based, so theoretically it can be used on any platform. The main documentation for installation/configuration is based on *Unix, however there is a document that was contributed explaining how to install/run on a Windows OS.
The main features are:
- Network Health/Metrics
- Interface Utilization Statistics – both current and historical available
- Availabiity (UP/Down) monitoring
- Server monitoring including Processor, Memory, Services, etc…
- Network Device Configuration backup
- SNMP Trap receiving (with help of contributed tools).
- Distributed Monitoring Feature (new!) - Nagios – http://www.nagios.orgSeveral Large companies use this for monitoring and is highly popular in the Open Source Network Monitoring Arena. Here are the features:
- Monitoring of network services (SMTP, POP3, HTTP, NNTP, PING, etc.)
- Monitoring of host resources (processor load, disk and memory usage, running processes, log files, etc.)
- Monitoring of environmental factors such as temperature
- Simple plugin design that allows users to easily develop their own host and service checks
- Ability to define network host hierarchy, allowing detection of and distinction between hosts that are down and those that are unreachable
- Contact notifications when service or host problems occur and get resolved (via email, pager, or other user-defined method)
- Optional escalation of host and service notifications to different contact groups
- Ability to define event handlers to be run during service or host events for proactive problem resolution
- Support for implementing redundant and distributed monitoring servers
- External command interface that allows on-the-fly modifications to be made to the monitoring and notification behavior through the use of event handlers, the web interface, and third-party applications
- Retention of host and service status across program restarts
- Scheduled downtime for supressing host and service notifications during periods of planned outages
- Ability to acknowlege problems via the web interface
- Web interface for viewing current network status, notification and problem history, log file, etc.
- Simple authorization scheme that allows you restrict what users can see and do from the web interface - OpenNMS – http://www.opennms.orgClaims to be “the world’s first enterprise-grade network management platform developed under the open-source modelâ€. I have no experience with this system either, however it also has a strong following of users.
Features include:
- Service Polling: the system monitors services on the network and reports on their “service levelâ€.
- Performance: data is collected from the remote systems via SNMP in order to measure the performance of the network.
- Event Management and Notifications: OpenNMS includes a robust notification system, including escalations, that can be generated by network events - JFFNMS – http://jffnms.sourceforge.net/Another System that is actively developed and widely supported (again, no personal experience).
Features include:
- Written in PHP (Works on Linux, FreeBSD and Win2K/XP)
- Status Map, gives you a quick look of your network
- Events Console, shows all kinds of events in the same time-ordered display
- Performance Graphs for everything, Interface Traffic, Errors, CPU Usage, etc.
- Integrated Syslog Logging and Tacacs+ Authentication and Accounting