Open source network monitoring
I’ve used various network monitoring tools over the last few years, in particular Cacti, System Center Essentials and now Zenoss.
Cacti is great for monitoring SNMP hosts and has some incredible graphing abilities. The problem I had with Cacti is simply that there’s no useful OS error monitoring. So, there became a requirement for either a replacement or additional monitoring system.
This was where System Center Essentials came in. It had the promise of SNMP monitoring, windows agent support and other goodies. Unfortunately even with SP1 the performance was poor and I was frequently plagued with meaningless alerts (to which the Microsoft solution was to filter them out). SNMP reporting was so poor that SCE just had to go.
I then came across Zenoss, so far it looks really swish. It has a nice user interface, SNMP graphing and WMI interaction with windows hosts – meaning full event log monitoring. Check out the screenshots below and then go and take a look at their website!
We’re always happy to hear from enthusiastic users, have you gotten very far with it yet? Have you gotten to try out the new 2.2 release yet, it just came out Monday. Feel free to visit the forums or let me know if you have any questions.
Thanks,
Matt Ray
Zenoss Community Manager
mray@zenoss.com
Hi Matt,
I’ve been playing with it for a day or two, my biggest problem at the moment is getting WMI monitoring to run under anything other than an admin account is seemingly impossible.
The only problem i’ve come across so far is that link detection for the mappingg isn’t too inteligent. We have RAS servers which establish a PPTP interface and because SNMP reports a /32 on the interface it doesn’t detect the link – drop me an e-mail if you want to know more 🙂
All in all, a superb product though.
Dave
You should also check out Hyperic as well. They offer a great alternative to Zenoss along with tons more features. Their systems monitoring tools and plugins are really cool.
Hello Dave,
Thanks for the small review of Zenoss network monitoring software. But what about paid services? I currently try to choose between Zenoss and paid subscription from Dotcom Monitor. May be you can write some comparison? They are at http://www.dotcom-monitor.com/network-monitoring.asp I will appreciate it because i have a lack of knowledge in network monitoring. Thanks again.