Recommend me some good SNMP solutions

J

jadams

2[H]4U
Joined
Mar 14, 2010
Messages
4,086
My boss today tasked me with setting up an SNMP server for our customers' servers. They would forward SNMP to our office and we'd monitor the servers. We are looking to monitor roughly 200 servers.

Recomedations? Free or Paid.
 
Servers? No idea, i guarantee one of the next few comments will be Cactii though.

Everyone does SNMP. HP, Solarwinds, Manage Engine, PRTG, etc. Take your pick.

All of them have their pros and cons. Personally, I don't think there is one end all, be all.
If I were in your shoes, i would take some of the above mentioned names and do some research. You know what you need to monitor and what type of specific thing's your looking for. Worst case scenario, most of them have a free demo/trial that you can play with.

(I believe our server guys use HP Openview. On the network side, we use CA NetQoS.)
 
PRTG here, still going through setting it up how we want it. Fairly powerful as well, just upped it to an unlimited sensor license.

I will report back later! :D
 
For pretty bandwidth graphs, I like cacti. Very easy to zoom in (one of the benefits of rrd).

Otherwise, I'm very happy with Solarwinds. It is in my opinion too expensive, but the support and community is very good and it can do anything you want it to without any trouble. Well worth the money.

As was mentioned earlier, there are quite a few other free and paid ones that all have their pros and cons - so I would try them all out. I think everything worth looking at that isn't free has a trial period. And let us know what you think...

Solarwinds Demo Site
 
One distinction I want to make is platforms that can monitor SNMP enabled devices and platforms that handle SNMP traps from SNMP devices.

Most enterprise grade NMS systems do both, but not all NMS system do trap management.

I've used some of the big boy NMS systems (Openview, Unicenter, Zyrion) and some of the smaller packages (Paessler PRTG, Solarwinds, Cacti, Nagios) and I'm more of a fan of the smaller packages.
 
We have a solution called DopplerVue, that is supplied by the same people who make our call recording software. I dont care for it much, but it is free and is included in our support. The interface is a bit clunky and we can never seem to get it to install properly.

www.dopplervue.com
 
Depends on how powerful you want to go with it.

We use Solarwinds where I work and it's quite an amazing piece of software that has been recently broken up into smaller chunks so you can buy more of what you want. Though it is quite expensive, the support and community are a great resource for easily achieving what you want.

Where I previously worked I set up a Nagios install on a Linux box and if your monitoring needs are simple, this free solution worked quite well.
 
I'm a little unfamilar with the SNMP protocol.

I have a questions. Is 2 way communication required between a the server sending and receiving the traps? Or is the sending server only sendin? No need for anything coming back?
 
SNMP traps are one way, similar to UDP packets.

Depending on the solution you end up going with, it may be more secure to put a collector at each site which all the local servers send their traps to and then have those traps be uploaded to your server at your location.

Since you are just getting started, download the free copy of kiwi syslog server and then bring it up on a local network. Have some switches and some servers send their traps to this device so you have an idea what it looks like and which type of events you want to generate traps.
 
The last place I was at used Nagios, and it could be quite powerful. We had it set up to monitor disk space, processor load, services, memory load, network speed, Nagios would then alert based off of time of day, day of the week, and then specific people. So the e-mail admin wouldn't have to get paged or e-mailed about an issue with the Linux web server.
 
Rebumping this thread. I looked at SolarWinds based off most of the suggestions in this thread. However it doesnt work for remote customers. Our customers' servers are behind NAT resulting in only one way communication.

I'd like to monitor our software which has the ability to send out traps when errors occur. I'd also like to be able to monitor cpu, memory, hard drive usage as well.

From what I understand it is the SNMP server that polls a client and then the client sends that information out. Since the clients are behind NAT theres just no way to make that work. I need something that will make clients proactive in sending this information out without being polled.

VPN on each machine would be idea, but thats just not going to happen. Lots of our customers are financial, and healthcare institutions. Their security just wont have that.

Cliffs:
Solarwinds no worky
One way, outgoing traffic from remote nodes only
cpu, memory, hdd, network traffic monitoring
 
jadams said:
Rebumping this thread. I looked at SolarWinds based off most of the suggestions in this thread. However it doesnt work for remote customers. Our customers' servers are behind NAT resulting in only one way communication.

I'd like to monitor our software which has the ability to send out traps when errors occur. I'd also like to be able to monitor cpu, memory, hard drive usage as well.
Click to expand...

PRTG, has remote probes, that you can point to send data out to a public PRTG server IP. Probes scan locally and report to the PRTG server.
 
Thanks Mike.

Installed PRTG on our server and deployed a Probe at a test site. I used out public IP as the destination and made sure to forward 23560 to the server. UDP and TCP. I was wondering why I wasnt getting any kind of notification about a new node.

I installed Wireshark on the remote probe's machine and I dont see anything going to our public IP.
 
I was going to say check the Windows firewall, however since you've tested Wireshark and got nothing then it may be a forwarding issue on the port forward. Or something on the remote site blocking that port 23560, is it opened up at the remote end? i.e. in the Windows firewall where the probe is on and maybe the firewall there?
 
Remote probe machine has firewall off. If the network itself were blocking the port I'd still see it go out on wireshark.

Are you subscribed? that was a fast response ;)
 
It seems as though I can manually add probes. But I cannot do that as I run into my original problem that they're behind their own NAT.
 
So it's NAT on their site and NAT on your side? Our remotes are NAT, but PRTG itself has a real public IP. That's the only difference I can think of.
 
We move into a new office next week and we'll have 5 statics. Id rather not have to give this thing its own static, but I'll give it a shot.

It still doesnt make sense that I dont see any packets going out.

I even tried a probe locally. I'm still tinkering with that one.
 
Yes I did. Tried it on auto first. Then made sure it was mapped to an actual interface.

However I seem to have also stumbled across a nifty link "PRTG 9 MANUAL: Remote Probe Setup"

time to RTFM

Thanks for your help so far.
 
NP, here are some screen caps of one of my remote's.



Make sure the service is starting and not crashing or anything like that. If it's not sending any traffic that you can see on Wireshark, perhaps the service is failing?
 
Also make sure you have your keys in there.



You should be able to get away with just one key. But I want to be able to trash a single key if needed.
 
Well you can go ahead and call me a moron....

This whole time using Wireshark I was using ip == x.x.x.x instead of ip.addr == x.x.x.x

The probe was sitting there waiting to be approved the whole time.
 
Mike, have you ever tried to import custom MIB's?

Got a remote probe up and running and I recieved a MIB file from our software vendor. Converted it to their oidlib and manually copied it to the snmplibs sub directory.

According to this guide:
http://www.paessler.com/tools/mibimporter

there should be a way to add that OIDLIB into the SNMP Library. But the things they talk about in the guide are not available in the web interface, or nowhere else I can seem to find them.
 
Nevermind.... after reading through their KB another user had the same issue. Their documentation isnt very straightforward. the SNMP Library is under the available sensors. There is where custom MIB/OIDLIB's are kept.
 
Yeah, some things are a bit off with the doc's. They also don't do well with XenServer pools, but work fine with stand alone XenServer hypervisors. But for what it can do + the price, it rocks ass.

I've done a couple of custom MIB templates, mainly for my tripp lite snmp/envirosense modules.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top