[AusNOG] Network Management and Tools

[Robert Brockway]

On Mon, 5 Jul 2010, David Hughes wrote:

> 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

Not everyone - this has troubled me for a long time :)  I spent quite a 
lot of time looking at a lot of the FOSS options and found most of them 
had problems that I just felt shouldn't be there.

I ended up settling on collectd (http://www.collectd.org).  It does 
historical reporting, can do alerting, and can hook in to Nagios to have 
that do the alerting if you prefer.

It supposed CSV & RRD backends with SQL coming soon apparently.

Seperating the information gathering from the GUI was a stroke of genius 
that seems obvious in hindsight.

> 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

Actually there are Nagios add-ons that will do this but they weren't very 
sophisticated IMHO.

Cheers,

Rob

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