SNMP Monitoring ?

D

dashpuppy

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can any one help or explain this ?

I think i know what it is, but id like to also possibly use a free piece of software to use it ?

Isn't SNMP Monitoring, for monitoring servers & devices ? You have a dedicated / virtualized server running the SNMP service that talkes to all your devices then sends out alerts via email text message etc etc..

If im correct, is there free software out there I can use at home to monitor my servers & devices ?

IE :

Firewall
Switch
servers ( inside vm's ) 2008r2 < have a few of these for web & email and other things.

Dash.
 
"Depends". SNMP is, near as I can tell, a "wonky" subject.

See, devices/servers can RUN snmp. And this allows other servers to grab data off of them. You can also write data to these devices, presumably, but I've never done that.

Then you have "snmp traps", wherein the devices send snmp data to a specified server ( in the form of hieroglyphs...I think ) triggered by an event.

However, that's all pretty much meaningless, I just felt like throwing it out there. It sounds to me like you want a network monitor AND you have devices you want to monitor. Nagios is what you are looking for. It is, in a word, FUCKING AWESOME. It can monitor snmp devices, but it can do so much more as well. Check it out, let me know if you have any questions. I've actually written quite a few plugins for it I'd be happy to share ( both on windows and linux. Including snmp plugins for printer supply levels ).
 
SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) - Allows you to either retrieve data (stats) from a device and/or allows you to issue commands. Most people use it to simply monitor their network and services. SNMP is not supported by every device, but a good chunk of things do.

Nagios - Great monitoring tool that can SMS TXT you when services or hosts go down. Highly configurable, free and has a very active following.

Cacti - Another great monitoring tool. I personally use it for "traffic" graphing my routers, switches, servers, etc. Also free, highly configurable and an active following.

MRTG - plain cut and dry traffic graphs, very configurable but can be a burden to configure.

All great tools and each can compliment each other.
 
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Please provide us all an a b c crash course in nagios. I want to use it as well. I haven't the slightest clue where to begin. Thanks in advance.
 
The high level over view:

Nagios is, at it's core, just a process that runs on a server that periodically checks the various servers and services specified. The first concepts you need to understand are those of "Normal", "Warning" and "Critical". When defining a service, you will often tell nagios what you consider to be a warning level, and what you consider to be a critical.

The heart of nagios is the generic concept called "plugins". These are nothing more than little apps/scripts that "do something", then return exit statuses between 0 and 3 ( depending on the results of the "do something" part ). For instance, you have a ping check. You can define the warning and critical thresholds. You might say that any latency over 100ms is a warning you should get notified about, and anything over 200 or any dropped packets are considered critical. You can specify pretty much any other property you can think of; frequency of checks to notification blackout periods.

As far as notifications, you simply define contacts and set what notifications they receive and when.

That's the basic basic intro. There's more to it. Far far more, but it's kind of complex. For monitoring other servers, you need to load agents that act as a proxy for the requests from the nagios server ( they run the plugins, then return the results to the requesting nagios service ). The best way to get started is to download and install it, then post specific questions.
 
At the previous place we were using Cacti and Nagios together. We used Cacti to graph and collect data on loads (Netflows, CPU load, Memory Load, Hard drive IO, etc), and Nagios for monitoring and alerting when systems went down, when load was getting too high, etc.

It worked pretty well. I was trying to get them to get me a large monitor/TV to display those graphs on so we could have a quick easy way to see what was going on with the various environments.
 
XOR != OR said:
"Depends". SNMP is, near as I can tell, a "wonky" subject.

See, devices/servers can RUN snmp. And this allows other servers to grab data off of them. You can also write data to these devices, presumably, but I've never done that.

Then you have "snmp traps", wherein the devices send snmp data to a specified server ( in the form of hieroglyphs...I think ) triggered by an event.

However, that's all pretty much meaningless, I just felt like throwing it out there. It sounds to me like you want a network monitor AND you have devices you want to monitor. Nagios is what you are looking for. It is, in a word, FUCKING AWESOME. It can monitor snmp devices, but it can do so much more as well. Check it out, let me know if you have any questions. I've actually written quite a few plugins for it I'd be happy to share ( both on windows and linux. Including snmp plugins for printer supply levels ).
Click to expand...

Does Nagios, fit the free budget tho ?
 
dashpuppy said:
Does Nagios, fit the free budget tho ?
Click to expand...
The software is free, and it runs on Linux, so mostly. your time seeing it up is worth something though, but otherwise free.

I'm going to investigate cacti,ian, as that sounds like exactly what i want to do.
 
klank said:
SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) - Allows you to either retrieve data (stats) from a device and/or allows you to issue commands. Most people use it to simply monitor their network and services. SNMP is not supported by every device, but a good chunk of things do.

Nagios - Great monitoring tool that can SMS TXT you when services or hosts go down. Highly configurable, free and has a very active following.

Cacti - Another great monitoring tool. I personally use it for "traffic" graphing my routers, switches, servers, etc. Also free, highly configurable and an active following.

MRTG - plain cut and dry traffic graphs, very configurable but can be a burden to configure.

All great tools and each can compliment each other.

Here are a few examples from my Cacti setup:
Click to expand...


I also use Cacti and Nagios. We use nagios for ping checks to all of our routers as well as monitoring performance of servers. We use cacti for bandwidth graphing as well.

I've found that the bandwidth graphing of Nagios wasnt as good as the Cacti graphing. Nagios took some tweaking to get it to display how we wanted it to.
 
Also work looking into pnp4nagios, whilst it isn't a cacti replacement as such its nice to have some historic data for alerts etc.
 
bmh.01 said:
Also work looking into pnp4nagios, whilst it isn't a cacti replacement as such its nice to have some historic data for alerts etc.
Click to expand...

the main goal is to have some kind of notification if there are problems at home... of something is failing.
 
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