Network Management on the cheap
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Scooby Regular
Joined: Dec 2001
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If you are looking at some network management tools but can't afford them because your IT budget has been cut take a look at the following.
www.netsaint.org
Netsaint is a opeen source swiss army knife of network management tools. It starts out basically like a better version of whatsup gold. You can then install different plugins to do different tasks such as monitoring NT servers performance counters or sinking SNMP traps. You will need a linux box to run it on as well.
**** Warning it does take some configuration, no nice GUI's... Lots of text files to edit ****
It is worth the effort so stick to it.
Here is a demo of what it looks like when configured http://tech.knet.ca/netsaint/
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Scooby Regular
Joined: Mar 1999
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The Netsaint name is being dropped in favour of "Nagios" .
Its quite flexible, there are cgi gui's around to help with the config. but I usually end up mucking about in Vi anyway.
The network I design has very large management systems whcih are great - once any new bits have been added. When we deploy or test sytems I have a NetSaint instance which I can immediately add the new kit to, so that the development team can keep track of how its doing. Because it can use any script to monitor things you have quite a good degree of flexibility. I managed to cobble together a script to screen scrape some dial statistics and alert when fewer than 5% free channels remain. (we cant do anything but the mail's remind the platform manager he needs to upgrade
).
Elsewhere the developers of our e-Portal use netsaint to automatically change the status (indicated by a weather icon) when kit fails.
Likewise we have Concord Network Health to record every stat under the sun for all the routers/switches - but I also use MRTG to quickly keep tabs of new boxes.
Deano
(Trainee Linux Hacker)
Its quite flexible, there are cgi gui's around to help with the config. but I usually end up mucking about in Vi anyway.
The network I design has very large management systems whcih are great - once any new bits have been added. When we deploy or test sytems I have a NetSaint instance which I can immediately add the new kit to, so that the development team can keep track of how its doing. Because it can use any script to monitor things you have quite a good degree of flexibility. I managed to cobble together a script to screen scrape some dial statistics and alert when fewer than 5% free channels remain. (we cant do anything but the mail's remind the platform manager he needs to upgrade
).Elsewhere the developers of our e-Portal use netsaint to automatically change the status (indicated by a weather icon) when kit fails.
Likewise we have Concord Network Health to record every stat under the sun for all the routers/switches - but I also use MRTG to quickly keep tabs of new boxes.
Deano
(Trainee Linux Hacker
)
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