[AusNOG] Network Management and Tools

[David Hughes]

On 05/07/2010, at 8:38 AM, Julien Goodwin wrote:

>> What do you use for
>> 
>>   * Alarm/event management (SNMP traps, syslog)
> Nagios, although we poll and don't use traps.
> 
>>   * Performance management (SNMP Polls)
> Cacti, have been trying ObserverNMS

This is one thing that amazes me about FOSS monitoring systems.  Everyone thinks its normal and totally acceptable to have 2 different systems for realtime monitoring and historical reporting.  So,  for example I have nagios poll a device to ensure CPU is within desired bounds.  I then have cacti poll the same device for the same OID so that it can store the data in an RRD file so I can look at a graph.

I know we all do it but why do we all think it's perfectly fine to collect almost every single monitoring metric twice ?  What an amazingly inefficient way of doing this.  Problem is I can't find anything that I'd be happy to use as a replacement for nagios and cacti.  Surely it would make total sense to extend nagios so it actually remembered the data it collected rather than just doing a real-time evaluation and then throwing the data away.  There are some nagios rrd type hacks but, really, how hard could this really be.


David
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