[c-nsp] Free NMS Tools

[Oliver Gorwits]

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Hi,

Sorry for the late follow-up on this,

Saku Ytti wrote:
> Other thing that annoys me is how SNMP pollers are implemented,
> they're blocking, giving sucky performance on misbehaving or down
> nodes.

Oh I agree, most of the free NMS systems out there do a fairly poor
job of efficiently polling devices.

So we put some development time in, and what we came up with is not
really cutting edge, but explores a few novel ideas:

   http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?YATG
   http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?YATG::Tutorial

Simply, it's an SNMP poller daemon which polls devices in parallel
at some time interval, for OIDs specified in config.

We then take that data and put it into a Memcached server, from
where other services can read. The nice thing there is that we only
poll devices once (it being CPU intensive) but many client systems
can check the retrieved data (e.g. tools for end users, tools for
helpdesk, Nagios, etc).

We actually have a Nagios plugin which reads the Memcached store for
the ports and errors state for each device. Well, it's Nagios within
Opsview - a much better piece of software which I highly recommend:

   http://www.opsview.org/

The traffic counter data is also stored to flat file, from which we
draw graphs in some tools such as Netdisco. I dislike RRD because of
the (potential) loss of resolution in the long term, and the binary
format. We have tuned text file storage to be quite efficient and it
works very well (better than RRD, and databases/SQL which we also
tested).

   http://netdisco.org/

Most of the above (YATG) is a 1st gen. effort, and we'd rewrite it
given a chance, but it works very well and has proved the concepts.

HTH,

- --
Oliver Gorwits, Network and Telecommunications Group,
Oxford University Computing Services
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