[AusNOG] Network Management and Tools

[phil colbourn]

Sorry Andrew, when I wrote this:

What concerns me is that once upon a time we used Nagios/NetSaint,

> big-brother, cricket, MRTG, and looked at Rancid, Cacti, OpenNMS and

> ZenOSS.

> Have we moved in the wrong direction?


I was talking about the organisation I work for, not the AusNOG community.

Phil

On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 8:43 AM, Andrew Fort <afort at choqolat.org> wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 1:56 AM, phil colbourn <philcolbourn at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Again, that you for sharing your use of network management tools.
> > I have roughly tallied the main products mentioned: (I counted OpsView as
> > Nagios+MRTG)
> > Nagios  7
> > MRTG  3
> > Cacti  4
> > RANCID  5
> > and notably
> > PRTG  2
> > Collectd  2
>
> I don't know why collectd, something which does very little, fits the
> unix pipeline mentality, and is thus incredibly useful for sysadmins
> and toolwriters, is "notable", but it's pretty good :).
>
> > Many use custom in-house-developed databases, scripts and tools.
>
> The "every network is different" bit applies here.  Turns out most of
> the scripts people use that are custom are tying together their
> pipelines.
>
> Because your network (or gear) may be service oriented, your database
> probably has customers and services in it, too; that's fine, but it's
> going to differ from a content provider who has only peers and mostly
> runs a SP BGP kinda network.
>
> And finally because you'll come at things from different levels of
> requirements, maturity, time/money budgets.  Letting protocols deal
> with most of the issue without them being modelled seems generally
> fine.  At some point you're going to need to automate some knobs, at
> which point you do the extra work.
>
> > A significant number use commercial products.
> > Most described alarm/event/performance management or configuration backup
> > products
> > A few mentioned configuration generation systems.
>
> No-one mentioned how to actually deploy that stuff to routers.  What
> if I have to deploy to 10 different hardware platforms and
> so-on.  Are people just wrapping RANCID scripts for this?   (I used to
> do it this way, quite handy).  At some point years ago I needed
> something a little more complicated and so had the idea for an agent
> to manage these CLI connections.  I wrote that
> (http://code.google.com/p/notch) open source after having written it
> at my last employer.  But mostly it's just been my itch to scratch.
>
> What other tools are people using for deployment of configuration to
> routers?  I mean everything from config + bootp/dhcp to in-place
> automation.  I'm less interested in the "we use 5620 SAM" (Alcatel's
> sales droids don't have to work hard here - it really doesn't suck!),
> but more interested in the "here's how we do that for 5 different
> vendors' gear".  That's the problem I've been interested in solving
> with open source software, and IMO it's better than the commercial
> approaches here.
>
> > Does that seem about right? Are these typical of what network operators
> are
> > using?
>
> In Australia, yes.  An exhaustive list?  Certainly not.
>
> > No one mentioned (other NMS products that I have heard of) HP OpenView,
> > Tivolli, NetCool, cricket, OpenNMS, ZenOSS or even SNMP2XML ;) ?
>
> Plenty of people use OpenNMS and ZenOSS.  I've a little experience
> with ZenOSS and its Python is not a good posterboy for the language
> (good Perl == Radiator.  good python == most anything except zenoss,
> it seems).  It's relatively powerful, but I dislike the "we do
> everything" approach, personally.
>
> >
> >
>
> What do you mean; people are apparently using less "integrated" NMSes,
> so this is a bad thing?  If so, I disagree.
>
> Big NMSes, million dollar software with $3000/day consultants, should
> this be encouraged?  I think not.  Instead, start from the ground up,
> with a few basic requirements.  You don't need to spend big money to
> do that.  Conversely, a million dollar price tag doesn't mean they
> have customers who use the software to do what you do. Shocking, I
> know.  The important part is that you need your best operators,
> architects and engineers to talk about this long enough to get a set
> of requirements and a design isolated.
>
> Again referencing Stephen Stuart's NANOG26 presentation about these
> things: "perfect is the enemy of done.".
>
> -a
>



-- 
Phil

http://philatwarrimoo.blogspot.com
http://code.google.com/p/snmp2xml

"Someone has solved it and uploaded it for free."

"If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to look."

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur C. Clarke - Who does magic today?
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ausnog.net/pipermail/ausnog/attachments/20100708/45a7f8d1/attachment.html>