Best of the ISP-Lists

Fixed Wireless Equipment

Monitoring the Network

On the ISP-Wireless list, members discuss a perennial topic: network monitoring. The coversation stays the same but the ISPs are refining their open source tools and measurement methods.

[November 28, 2007]

On the ISP-Wireless list in November, MC posted the following note:

We're doing an upgrade to our Maintenance. server. Since it's a ground-up replacement, I want to evaluate new packages. What's everybody using for monitoring bandwidth at APs, SMs, etc.? This is for a CentOS server.

Some of the packages we use now:

MRTG
SmokePing
Nagios

More input is very welcome!

[DK replied] "If you have any development experience (or can find a decent GUI) you might want to check out RTG instead. No aggregating, stores data in MySQL database so you can create custom reports, etc."

[DB wrote] "We use cricket and nagios (and bubba for 95 percentile calculations).

These days, you might also look at Cacti and Hyperic."

[DS added] "I am an MRTG nut but recently I moved over to Cacti as my monitoring agent of choice. It has a built in 95 percentile, total data transferred etc..

I have the equivalent of MRTG/Smoke-ping running and when I add a new CPE I use one of the templates in Cacti to create it. This saves time. Heck, the web-interface is so easy to use (once you get into the Cacti mindset) that my wife/office manager (she rocks by the way) adds CPE for me.

As for "page me when things are broken" I live and die by Nagios. Now if only I could find an _EASY_ web-front end for configuring the beast!"

[RI noted] "Look at cactiusers.org. Super easy to install. Download the image and burnit. Stick it in the drive of your target machine. Sit back and let it install. Login and start configuring hosts. It installs Cacti, Ntop, Nagios, and some others. It also has a syslog server which is nice to have all of this info in one place. I don't think smoke ping is on the image but it would be pretty to add to the box. The only real draw back I found is that the time drifts by days in a matter of minutes if you run it under VMWare. I am in the process of migrating to a dedicated server because of the time drift."

[DF recommended to RI] "Perhaps loading ntp client on to it, syncing it to an NTP server, will alleviate that issue. Ntpd can be either client, server, or both. Then you could continue to run in VMWare. The worst that could happen is that you would have a lot of clock adjustments."

—End