Re: Backbone Monitoring Tools

[Kevin <kkadow () gmail com>]

On 3/28/06, Ashe Canvar <acanvar () gmail com> wrote:
> I want a simple backbone monitor for my 5 datacenters. My "backbone"
> consists of  redundant IPSEC/GRE tunnnels.
>
> At the very least I want to ping, traceroute and transfer a small file
> every few minutes over all IPSEC links. I am sure there are products
> that do this already, but I am having a hard time finding any.

autostatus, mrtg, cricket, hobbitmon, cacti, nagios, big brother,are
all good options, find these and more on Freshmeat:
     http://freshmeat.net/browse/152/


> The display format should be noc-friendly. A basic grid with green/red
> status indicators at the least. Geographical maps a plus.

For noc-friendly latency reporting, look at SmokePing.  For deeper
tests of HTTP page loads and file transfers, HobbitMon could be what
you're looking for.

I'm not aware of any freeware products which draw nice geographic
maps, we have OpenView for that.  A few years ago I started work
towards generating dynamic network status graphics with Graphviz, but
management decided it would be easier and faster to buy OpenView
licenses.


> Do most of you use a home grown tool for this monitoring and alerting ?

I've found that I always end up writing some custom code, but you
could do worse than to build on top of one of the open-source
monitoring tools.

For example, I use a highly customized version of AutoStatus for
up/down alerting, primarily because I like how it handles
dependencies.

Kevin