[c-nsp] service monitoring on a small scale?

[neal rauhauser]

  Ladies & Gentlemen,


     I have a customer with two physical locations and two different
upstream providers. One of these providers is solid and the other is a
chronic behavior problem, with local loop, internal routing, and BGP related
errors roughly evenly distributed.

    Yesterday we cooked a POS card in a 7507 and the customer has just had
it with stuff breaking at 0200 and learning about it at 0900 via fifty angry
customer messages.

     The failure modes we see are not simple link up/down things that could
be caught with syslog or Nagios. We've had a steady flow of things that
cause loss or latency over the last year without having any sort of outright
failure.

     We want to be able to ensure quality of customer experience and we know
this has to go down to the level of TCP segment loss across sessions.

     Our equipment is 7500s at the edge, internal routing with Catalyst
3550s, and for support OS we can do Linux or FreeBSD. We don't mind a little
legwork if there are free tools that can do these things.

   I don't think I'm interested in hearing about payware that costs what a
small car does - an AdventNet sized tool ($1,000 or so) would be reasonable.
There is no need for sales people from other carriers to contact me about
this - its a rural area and the two providers we have are the only ones
available.

  Looking forward to much wise advise on this point ...


                               Neal