Network Monitoring Software advice

[eclipsedx]

Hi there.

Im currently working for a big ICT company in SA. I have been searching the web for the last 3 weeks flat. Im looking for enterprise network monitoring and reporting software that is new and up to date. I know of Solarwinds and Hostmonitor. Open NMS is also a great hassel to get up and running 100%.

I was asked to come up with Ideas for updating out current NMS systems. I have a few but im still looking for something that would wow our potential customers. The main catch is always cost should be as low as you can get. If its free its even better.

I know there are a few people here thats been working in the Networking field for a few years now. It would really help if some pointers could be shared.

Im also looking into monitoring Voip networks and the QoS on it. Making sure quality is always high if there are any software that would help monitoring and reporting on these Voip networks it would be so great if thoughts could be shared.

Regards

Daniel

 

[AstroTurf]

Spiceworks

 

[eclipsedx]

xD Enterprise networks my friend you cant monitor about 2000 devices with spiceworks properly. I have tested it and its not bad for on site engineers but its not for large network infrastructures. Thanks anyway.

 

[devil's_child]

Spice works is ok..the nice thing is that is has a Help desk built in which is the only thing i really use it for ...downside is that it has to run on a windows machine....

The solution i use is Nagios .
Nagios is free & it runs on Linux so the only thing you will pay for is the hardware you gonna set it up on, plus nagios has a huge scale of what it can monitor.
downside to using nagios....it's a huge learning curve whne you start setting it up, but the good thing is that there is a huge support community that provides assistance and plugins and extra'.

it took me approx a month to set up nagios from scratch but that's cause i knew almost nothing about setting it up and i tested it for about 2 weeks before implementation

 

[linds.za]

I would have given +1 Spiceworks. Pity it's not for you.
Have you tried using spiceworks with remote collectors pushing data to a central site for dashboards / reporting?


edit: Nagios looks interesting. Mebbe I throw it into a VM and play a little.

 

[AstroTurf]

/me adds nagios to his little black book.

 

[eclipsedx]

Spice works is ok..the nice thing is that is has a Help desk built in which is the only thing i really use it for ...downside is that it has to run on a windows machine....

The solution i use is Nagios .
Nagios is free & it runs on Linux so the only thing you will pay for is the hardware you gonna set it up on, plus nagios has a huge scale of what it can monitor.
downside to using nagios....it's a huge learning curve whne you start setting it up, but the good thing is that there is a huge support community that provides assistance and plugins and extra'.

it took me approx a month to set up nagios from scratch but that's cause i knew almost nothing about setting it up and i tested it for about 2 weeks before implementation

Thanks for that reply. Well the OS isnt the problem for spiceworks really. I felt when over it that it would be perfect for companies that has onsite engineers working for them. I have looked at Nagios and didnt know that it was free. Spending time to getting to know how to implement the software isnt a great problem the greatest concern would be cost. Big companies today want to eleminate most overhead costs. We are currently paying a lot for Solarwinds and if we could get something that works just as good or even better the why not.

Please keep the ideas comming as i would share my final product here. As my plan is to perhaps supply our customers with a complete onsite solution managed remotly for them.

Thanks again

Daniel

 

[devil's_child]

Nagios has almost no overhead costs, with the exception of the time it takes to implement (time=money), the thing i like about nagios is, as i have said before, the flexibility it offers.
you can set it up to even notify you of nodes and specific monitored services by email when they go down.

I am using it to monitor everything from disk space on servers to proxy authentication errors in squid, dns, amount of users on wireless access points, memory, dell open manage, the list just goes on and on.

 

[eclipsedx]

See thats what im looking for we have 4 stand alone systems running each has its own set things its monitoring. Like HP insite manager and Solarwinds for SNMP traps for switches and routers. and Host monitor for ICMP Availability. So yeah getting everything into one system would be awesome. How is the reporting side of it tho?

 

[devil's_child]

reporting side is pretty good. you can manually set when it will note something in a warning or critical state and then set it up that it will send out a email notification to whoever you tell it to when a service or host goes into critical status or gets noted as down . it will even send a sms if you have the hardware to support smses.
but it's up to you to set it up the way you want it at the end of the day.....spend enough time with the plugins and learning the system and you could very well set it up to monitor anything you want it to monitor...(i even have it monitoring my server room temps)


checkout:
http://www.monitoringexchange.org/ to check what plug-ins are currently available by the community

 

[Nod]

You could also look at at:
www.zenoss.com
www.zabbix.com

 

[eclipsedx]

Thanks I have Zabbix. I will do some testing between Nagios and Zabbix.

Thanks for the response