SNMP Monitoring
Posted by g3tech, 08-27-2003, 10:23 PM Hello, Was just wondering what you guys out there use to monitor your devices in a DC. Bandwidth useage on ports, checking to make sure servers and other equipmnet are up, etc.
Posted by unixtx, 08-28-2003, 08:17 AM I use MRTG on the server to report all kinds of good info, historically and graphically. (The primary page is protesting the EU software patents, so click on the MRTG link to index-2 http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/mrtg/ And I use BigBrother to monitor servers remotely: http://bb4.com/
Posted by MarlboroMan, 08-28-2003, 05:46 PM Bandwidth: MRTG (see above for link) Server Monitoring: Nagios http://www.nagios.org/ It's super-powerful, extremely configurable, and extendable. But it's a royal PITA to set up if you've never worked with it before.
Posted by tbnguyen, 08-29-2003, 12:16 PM MarlboroMan, I checked out the nagios.org site... that snmp monitoring tool is awesome! I didn't start this thread, but just wanted to say thanks...
Posted by blzbr, 09-14-2008, 12:49 PM Hi, I tried nagios, cacti and zenoss. I really like zenoss (for a beginner point of view) and cacti is second. But my concern is about security to monitor windows and linux servers over the web in diferente DC's. 1- Do you ever run SNMP in this sort of environment ? 2- Every search I do endup in microsoft security issues and one of the options is net-snmp ? Is this ok ? 3- Is snmpv3 secure enough to this distributed (over different DC's) server model ? Thanks rp ps.: this is an old thread but it seems that this questions fit here.
Posted by prashant1979, 09-15-2008, 05:37 AM For windows you can setup the IP Sec policy for SNMP so that the community string is sent over the network in encrypted format and not clear text. As of SNMP in Linux, always change the community string to something else. The default is public.
Posted by Core4Tech, 09-15-2008, 08:28 PM I couldn't agree more with those that stated Nagios. I have used it since before it was Nagios and originally NetSaint. No matter what monitoring systems I have tried to implement, I have always gone back to Nagios. While Nagios does get overwhelming with editing configuration files from the CLI, there are numerous decent web based configuration utilities to aide you in getting up and running. Cacti is great for just graphing interface statistics and CPU utilization or the like. However if you want something more well rounded, definitely look closer at Nagios. If you want pretty graphs, there are many add-ons that will provide this from the perf-data collected by Nagios.
Posted by lamerfreak, 09-15-2008, 11:11 PM Can you recommend one? I messed with it enough to get a running config, but there didn't seem to be anything working well enough for v3+.
Posted by Panopta, 09-16-2008, 12:45 PM SNMPv3 adds support for hash-based authentication that avoids sending community strings in clear text. It also can encrypt the actual message data that goes back and forth, so it's pretty secure to use. If you layer on a firewall that restricts access to only your monitoring server's IP addresses, you should be pretty secure.
Posted by Core4Tech, 09-16-2008, 01:37 PM The nicest one is by GroundWork. You can use the community edition, which is free. There are others such as Ignoramus and Nagios Admin. I still stand by GroundWork CE though.
Posted by blzbr, 09-16-2008, 02:33 PM Hi Prashant and Panopta thanks for input over snmpv3. Thinking about the issue at win2k3 I've found something at technet but it seems that net-snmp is easyer to config...I'll try both. Panopta: snmpv3 + fw_rules seems to be the key...
Posted by 24x7group, 09-16-2008, 04:03 PM We read all info out with PRTG via SNMP on our switches. There is a seperate monitoring server that handles all of this for us