OSS network monitoring

[phishphreek]

lordwud: Thanks! looks like that would help out a lot.

[phishphreek]

Ok Lordwud, the initial "look" was deceiving.

What is so special about this software? Except that it took 2 hours to locate and install every stinking dependancy for it? It needs a dozen perl addons and about 2 dozen PEAR modules. Not only that, but their stupid "functions" file has a bug in it when checking the users/groups and I had to edit out the check just to get it to install.

I had it read in my existing config and I was able to find no benefit of using this interface over the original Nagios interface... except that this one is more clean and not as clunky. I don't really care how "nice" my interface looks for something like this. I just want it to work and work well.

I saw the ability to add/edit hosts directly from the web UI, but is that really a benefit? It really isn't that difficult to do it from the flat files that Nagios uses. The hard part about setting up Nagios was planning, defining what hosts/services to monitor and creating templates for that. Once that was done, it was a simple copy/paste of the templates a couple hundred times.

Granted... it was very late last night when I finally did install it and my eyes were very droopy by the time I finished the install/initial config. I'll look it over more in detail this morning.

What I find very disturbing is that there are no docs in english. The english install manual is a freaking flash video.

[phishphreek]

Actually I've never worried about bandwidth and performance, because then you have to look at it. I like my tools simple like legos for toddlers, so I use Argus which is a simple up or down tool.

http://argus.tcp4me.com/

I like Nagios too, but I've been using Argus much longer.

Haha! I felt like you did for a while too. It wasn't my responsiblity at the time to care about it. I had too much other stuff to take care of and I'd just pass it onto my superior.

What do you tell your bosses when they ask about LAN/WAN utilization or if it was possible to add X service and Y service? "I don't know?" Thats what we had to keep doing... and it was getting VERY old. We knew that our WAN was maxed out, but we knew only after everyone started complaining about performance.

We had some tools (numera network monitor), but it was never setup properly to begin with, and their licensing scheme sucks. It could only be installed in one place, there was no web UI and only one user could be viewing it at a time. So, you either had to physically go to the console or terminal services into it.

[phishphreek]

Not sure if this project would interest you or not. Its a type of monitoring and really helped recently when i went and updated all the switches in my facility for documentation purposes.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/switchmap/

I quickly looked at this the other day. I plan on playing with it more today. It looks promising. Simple tool and invaluable info. When we installed the new network, we kept tabs on every device on every port and etc... but that will become a pain to manage as we go forward.

[phishphreek]

I know this has been covered in the past, and I was looking at the original thread last night... but what do people use for printer monitoring? Right now, I'm just looking at up/down status, and checking things like pagecount and consumables.

Does anyone log it to a syslog server and have some script to analyze that data? I'm just looking for simple stats. How much printing, which times of days/which days of week, months of year, etc. Which departments print the most, etc. If I knew that type of info, I could get nicer printers for the onces who need it and cut back on the users who won't.

Right now, most of my network printers are HP2000 and HP4200 series with some 8000 series thrown in here and there. I think the color lasers are 3600 series. I may have the odd Lexmark OptraS 2450 laying around... but most of them were replaced with the 4200 series.

[Spyrus]

I know this has been covered in the past, and I was looking at the original thread last night... but what do people use for printer monitoring? Right now, I'm just looking at up/down status, and checking things like pagecount and consumables.

Does anyone log it to a syslog server and have some script to analyze that data? I'm just looking for simple stats. How much printing, which times of days/which days of week, months of year, etc. Which departments print the most, etc. If I knew that type of info, I could get nicer printers for the onces who need it and cut back on the users who won't.

Right now, most of my network printers are HP2000 and HP4200 series with some 8000 series thrown in here and there. I think the color lasers are 3600 series. I may have the odd Lexmark OptraS 2450 laying around... but most of them were replaced with the 4200 series.

I just started using: Print Inspector

It was recommended in this thread: http://antionline.com/showthread.php?t=275691

After using it for a couple weeks it works pretty well. It gives you page count, which user used it, it does NOT have to sit on the print server and puts together decent reports. The application is a mere 100 dollars too for unlimited printers as best as I could tell.

*Also for monitoring LAN/WAN traffice our enterprise uses NetQoS (http://www.netqos.com/), its a pretty good application, I am not sure of the cost behind it though