[c-nsp] Free NMS Tools

[Pavel Skovajsa]

Hi Saku,

I fully symphatetize with everything you said. The problem is that
there is NO system on the world with all of below, none of the
Nagios/OpenNMS etc. system do automatically what you have decribed
below. Most of them reduce their default activity to "let's ping it
and see what happens".

I am sure that some of those systems are open and prepared enough to
have this configured in some complicated manual way, and trigger
alarms based on this. Maybe also (dreaming) automatically logging onto
the device and getting necessary command output and possibly fixing a
simple situation (dreaming and smoking too much).

A good example of a beginning of such automatic expert system is Cisco
Output Interpreter.

Therefore all of this manual activity needs to be performed on per
device basis, which is time&effort consuming, which in our everyday
reality turns into people not doing it at all and stick with the old
''let's ping it and see what happens"

-Pavel


On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 9:01 AM, Saku Ytti<saku at ytti.fi> wrote:
> On (2009-07-03 14:00 +0100), Mario Spinthiras wrote:
>
> Hey,
>
>> I would say Zenoss is looking good because of the inventory management you
>> can do and because of the logical structure it puts everything in. I wrote
>>
>> Everything else just seems inadequate or poor.
>
> I recently spent few moments evaluating zenoss and was not impressed. To me
> all OSS NMS solutions out seem like they are made by coder-in-server-admin
> not coder-in-network-admin, and as such seem to have much more integration
> with servers than with network, zenoss seems like no exception.
>
> My main grief with NMS I've looked at is virtually no integration with network
> devices out of the box. Why don't they ship with MIBs or just specific OIDs
> for few top vendors important traps etc? Adding appropriate reaction
> classification. Networking is comparatively homogeneous environment, unlike
> server admins who have high variance in OS and applications, network
> operators out there have very similar requirements, allowing very advanced
> integration out-of-the-box. People want NMS to automatically monitor BGP,
> OSPF, IS-IS, LDP, status of some other CPU/memory than just control-plane
> pending few minutes thinking it would be easy to add lot of really common
> things here, that would be desired by very many network operators.
>
> Other thing that annoys me is how SNMP pollers are implemented, they're
> blocking, giving sucky performance on misbehaving or down nodes. And
> even still puzzlingly slow. While having SNMP poller poll 140k OID
> per second on 386 class PC is rather trivial, using two process strategy,
> where single process spews packets outs, and another listens what comes
> back, completely asynchronous, agnostic to any problem host may have.
> I've also only seen alarms based on absolute values of different counters,
> like CPU, memory, iface error counters etc. While I'd like automatic
> trending alarms, so if my memory use for past 5 months was relatively
> static, then for few consecutive days has increased steadily, it is
> likely memory leak, and I want to know about it, even if I have GB's of
> free memory. This type of 'trending' module should be relatively
> easy, and could be reused by any counter values.
>
> I demoed zenoss with 27 routers and it froze trying to poll their
> interface (granted there are very many interfaces). (2.3GHz Intel,
> with 2GB of memory), turning performance graphs off helped, of course.
> Trying to use zenpacks to add (3rd party provided) Cisco MIBs took
> hours and failed due to exhausted disk space, not sure which device
> it was, as it didn't tell, but smallest is /tmp with 186MB free.
>
> I'd be happy to pay zenoss enteprise costs, if it would have
> basics integration with network, but value it actually delivers
> to me, is actually so modest, you can pick up any other
> NMS there or hack something on your own. Since most time would
> be committed anyhow adding basic functionality.
>
> Thanks,
> --
>  ++ytti
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