[ale] OpenSource NMS Recommendations?

[Jay Loden]

Well, I'm not terribly familiar with Open Source NMS stuff, but I work for 
Fidelia Techology - we make Helix and NetVigil, network monitoring software. 
Helix is our smaller software, which is probably more in the range you're 
describing. http://fidelia.com/products

Our software does autodiscovery of your network topology, automatically sets 
up tests and default thresholds, etc. Basically you install it and you're up 
and running in an hour or two. you'll have up/down status reports, as well as 
stuff like disk usage, CPU, etc - whatever is monitorable by SNMP or WMI. Our 
software also does historical data and fancy graphs, etc.

That being said, I've also used Nagios, previous to being hired by Fidelia - 
as a matter of fact, I posted to ALE when I was setting it up looking for 
some help with it. Nagios was capable of decent options, but the 
configuration files were really rough to wade through. The documentation was 
lacking, so setting it up and making it work was pretty difficult, at least 
for me at my level of experience. It was capable, however, and had options 
for dependencies, service monitoring, and so on, and of course it's free 
software.

If it's in your budget and you don't mind close source software, I'd 
definitely recommend one of our products, if only because the amount of time 
you save with the auto-discovery of devices and not needing to go through 
config files to create hosts and service tests.

If you only have a really small number of devices, (I think you mentioned 5 
routers and a switch?) it might actually be easier/quicker to write your own 
set of scripts than to try and set up Nagios. There's a LOT of options and 
config files for Nagios, and it took me as long to set it up to monitor a 
dozen or so servers as it probably would have to write a set of scripts to 
serve the purpose.

-Jay

On Monday 04 July 2005 02:28 pm, brucelists at bellsouth.net wrote:
> Hey all,
>
>       I'm considering putting in a basic NMS for my lab. Have any of you
> worked with open source NMS systems? Any recommendations? I'm looking to do
> basic up/down monitoring and a tftp server for IOS and router/switch
> configurations.
>
>       I haven't played with any, but it looks like Bigsister and Nagios are
> the primary choices. I also looked a little at OpenNMS and NMIS
> (http://www.sins.com.au/nmis/) from the Cisco-Centric Open Source project.