Slightly [OT] Network Monitoring/Alerting tools

[Les Mikesell]

Adam Hough wrote:

> My only beef with OpenNMS is that it is a polling type monitoring
> system which is fine for say network gear but I would rather have a
> client/server setup for servers that I want to monitor.

Polling is the best way to know if a service is actually working, but 
OpenNMS also listens for SNMP traps, syslog messages, or xmlrpc events 
if you want to send things to it.

 > OpenNMS from
> what I can tell still does not give me the flexibility that I want or
> need that I get from other system such as Hobbit (BB) or Nagios.

Example?  Stock SNMP will report most of the usual stuff (interface 
bandwidth/errors, memory/disk/cpu use, etc.) and there are ways to 
extend it to other values.

> Though I will admit I had not know all that much about snmp other then
> to make sure that it is turned off on systems I install to give bots
> one less attack point if they make it past my iptable rules in some
> manner.

Don't turn read access off, just use a hard-to-guess community string. 
Usually you would block inbound access at your internet firewalls 
anyway.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com