[c-nsp] Network Monitor / Mgmnt App

[Arturo Servin]

    Excellent brief. It was very useful.

Thanks!!!!
-as

Dale W. Carder wrote:

>
> On Jun 4, 2005, at 11:10 AM, Arturo Servin wrote:
>
>>
>>     We were using MRTG, then Cricket and now we are evaluating Torrus
>> and RTG. Any comments about Torrus vs RTG?
>
>
> Torrus (was RRFW) takes some of the configuration ideas from
> Cricket, and uses a templated XML configuration system.  It
> comes with a good range of discovery for well-known devices.
> Since the config file is in XML, you have to recompile it to
> make any changes.  In a network with a lot of monitoring churn,
> it can take seemingly *forever* to do this operation.  Compared
> to a usual config file, the XML system has a learning curve.
>
> Torrus seems to have the same polling characteristics as running
> multiple instances of MRTG, which is that it did not seem to
> scale well in my testing.  If some polling operations get blocked,
> expect the polling not to complete.  Torrus, like the rest of the
> MRTG family, is not in my opinion for a big network unless
> you throw a stupid amount of hardware at what is inherently
> a software design problem.
>
> RTG is a completely different beast than you're used to with
> MRTG and friends.  There is a very high performance
> multithreaded poller.  I did some tests and the PC sitting
> on my desk at work could poll and record data for 15,000
> 64 bit instances across ~20 c6500 PE's in < 10 seconds.  The
> data is stored into an SQL database.  RTG is lean.  It gets its
> great performance characteristics by threading, randomizing
> the polling order (so you don't pound on one box too much),
> and by buffering disk writes via the SQL database.  Unlike
> how most people use RRD, RTG's data store is non-lossy,
> although if you wish, you can throw data away (average it).
> Since there is no RRD file to update, you're not opening and
> closing thousands of filehandles to do RRD's update & recalc
> operation.
>
> The last time I looked at RTG's graphical UI, it was a bit weak
> compared to RRDtool, but I think that time series graphs are
> mostly useless aside from placating management types anyway.
> The SQL database lets you generate custom reports such as top-n,
> histograms, or whatever else you can dream up, not to mention
> the ability to search through your data!  There are some basic
> examples that come with the distribution.  Configuration is
> simple (or just as poor as MRTG), just script the config file
> yourself and you're done.
>
> Dale
>
>
> ----------------------------------
> Dale W. Carder
> Network Engineer
> University of Wisconsin at Madison
> http://net.doit.wisc.edu/~dwcarder
>
>
>


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