I have been doing some research on integrating on our various network monitoring systems into one comprehensive system and originally I had been looking into using SQL Server Integration Services and integrating all of our disparate monitoring and logging systems into one database. However I’ve been coming across more and more network monitoring systems that might already have the capability to do everything we need it to.
I work for a small IT consulting firm with some large clients. We need to monitor both our own network as well as the networks of varying in size clients (less than 10 computers to thousands of computers, though for the most part we only need to monitor the servers for our large clients.) We currently use a few different pieces of software to help monitor everything we need to and its use isn’t standardized since some of our clients have different computer security policies that won’t allow us to use some of our software.
We currently use Spiceworks for inventory management and primarily only on our own network since many of our clients have security policies that wouldn’t allow the installation of the software on their network. We also use Servers Alive for the bulk of our monitoring. It is mainly used to ping servers we monitor to make sure they’re up as well as perform basic http commands to make sure the websites we monitor are up. This is useful but at the same time, there’s not a lot of info that goes along with the alerts it sends and we usually need to either physically log into servers or remotely log into servers and check error logs and perform diagnostics.
As we continue to grow, it is becoming apparent that we need to have a better monitoring solution.
I have done some research on alternatives to Spiceworks that also contain some if not all the functionality of Servers Alive as well as having additional functionality that we are looking for so we can automate several manual tasks we need to do. Spiceworks might have some of that functionality as well but I only started working here recently and I believe we are looking for something open source that we can tweak to fit most if not all of our needs.
I have looked at various network monitoring systems but there are so many and so many different features that it is daunting. Out of all the one’s I’ve looked at, Nagios, Zabbix and OpenNMS seems to be the best open source solutions that best fit our needs and each has their pros and their cons and what they can and can’t do is daunting to just figure out.
The functionality that we are looking to have in a network monitoring solution is first and foremost the ability to ping as well as perform http tasks to external IPs to see what is up and running and what isn’t. Next most important thing is the ability for us to be able to log that information and be able to develop reports based off that info (It would be alright if we had to manually query using and ODBC connection into the database or something.) With that in mind we would also like to be able to monitor certain services on servers that we have access to monitor more specific info. We would also like to be able to log and monitor the event logs for various client servers that we handle. Another big thing that we would like to be able to do is log and monitor various LDAP based systems such as AD and be able to develop reports on them. For example we host email and we currently run reports (manually) that query the information on all accounts per client and what the current quota is per mailbox. It would be useful to be able to automatically report that info once a month or so via email. I’m not sure if any of the network monitoring systems has the ability to run LDAP queries or if it does, to create scheduled tasks to run. We also have various different backups running from various different applications in different places. We would like to have an application that we could configure to parse through assorted logs and centralize that information as well as be able to send alerts if something goes wrong.
We have a diverse set of needs and we understand that there most likely isn’t a solution that will work right out of the box. We are looking for something that even if it takes us a year or so to configure and get working properly will be very expansive and allow us to develop lots of custom queries and reports. We are also looking for something that has the ability to monitor via agent as well as without since our clients have different protocols and policies. Anyone have any suggestions?
Sorry for making this so long, but I figured I’d be specific since there’s so many network monitoring solutions out there. Any help in finding a particular (preferably open source) product would be appreciated.