[AusNOG] Network Management and Tools

[Damien Gardner Jnr]

On 05/07/2010, at 10:15 AM, Andrew Oskam wrote:

> Is anyone actively deploying OpManager? If so, What are your opinions on it?

We set it up back in ~2004 when bigbrother went commercial.. - At the time it was a LOT cheaper than it is today.  we had a few issues (was very redhat-centric, and we had to get them to issue a number of patches to make it work correctly on debian, plus it installed its own MySQL server which *had* to run on port 3306, which was an issue as our monitoring box already ran mysql with a whole bunch of sources logging to it..), but on the whole, it was a very nice product!  If you had only one or two SNMP communities across your network, its subnet auto-probing was VERY handy, though even without it was still great at finding services (i.e. we could point it at a subnet, and it'd find the oracle 8i/9i servers, mysql, etc etc and pop in the correct modules.. 

One nice thing I liked about it (others seem to do it out of the box now as well) was the ability to tell it to use ssh instead of snmp for remote polling, which was great for customer-based servers where they didn't allow SNMP through the firewalls between us and the customer, etc..

We monitored ~200 servers plus associated switches/routers/etc with it, and absolutely loved it (the local reseller actually handed us a couple of temporary licenses to play with for a few weeks before we bought it).. - Being able to hand customers a login to it and have a defined view of just the servers which hosted their systems was *really* nice, and reduced support calls quite a bit..

Being mostly java, and us being a java shop back then, we used to do a fair bit of decompiling and patching around bugs, or adding in new features, and AdventNet were quite amenable to being sent patch files, despite it not being opensource, which is always a plus :)  So many vendors have a massive freak out when you send them a source patch for something they shipped as a binary..

As to what it's like now, I couldn't say, but with what it was back then, I'd have to assume it's pretty impressive now ;)

I've been playing with a fair few systems recently (wish I could find a backup of our old license!), and can't really find anything that compares for ease of setup..   Groundwork is very similar, but seems to want pretty a fairly highly specced machine to run on (It kept the 'lowly' dual 2.4 xeon I was testing it on at pretty close to a 1.5 load for two weeks, for my gigantic 25-machine network..  Yeah, no thanks..).  TBH, i'd love to just have the 'old' bigbrother back - I just want something I can throw a bunch of hostnames and services at (without more than 30 mins of setup..), and get an email/sms when something goes 'red'..

--DG

Damien Gardner Jnr
VK2TDG. Dip EE. GradIEAust
rendrag at rendrag.net -  http://www.rendrag.net/
--
We rode on the winds of the rising storm,
 We ran to the sounds of thunder.
We danced among the lightning bolts,
 and tore the world asunder
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