[c-nsp] Network Management System

[bill fumerola]

On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 08:42:16PM +0800, Daniel Hooper wrote:
> The only good NMS is the one you write yourself.

also the most expensive.

>                 ome of the things you'd expect from an NMS for a service
> provider:
[...]
> * ACL's and permissions to manage who can change / see what.
[...]
> * Integration with a help-desk ticket tracking system

the rest of the items you listed have been adequately covered in the
archives. 

for these two remaining components, look into Crowd and JIRA (respectively)
from Atlassian. Crowd can aggregate multiple authentication sources
(LDAP, Active Directory, etc.) and provide AAA lookups for all your
existing applications (via apache plug-ins or XML-RPC interfaces for
$language) and/or any custom.

JIRA is a great ticketing system - very powerful, extensible, etc. when
used with Crowd you could base the user back-end on both your customer
database and your employee database w/o actually merging them. if these
databases aren't reachable via LDAP you may need to write some java code
to do lookups against the data. the interface (in the OOP sense of the
word) is well defined.

in the end, if the FOSS community wants One All Encompassing NMS, an
organization (e.g. ISC) will have to step up and gather requirements,
funding, developers, etc. all of the existing "open source" systems with
such a for-profit corporate backer that are financially supported by
support and/or development contracts. priorities for integration and
collaboration with other systems (plug-ins) are based on profit.

i have nothing against such systems, but in my observations they just
end up being specialized (monitoring or data visualization or statistics),
limited to a handful of vendors, trailing behind bleeding edge devices,
and/or targeted to 1-200 devices OR 10,000-100,000 devices but not much
in-between.

there's so much quality open source tools and technology out there, in
some cases rivaling that of their commercial counterparts, but nothing
really weaves it all together.

-- bill