[hobbit] Semi-unrelated question on network monitoring

[Francesco Duranti]

I'm using Hobbit to monitor the availability of the routers and at this
moment I'm using a standard mrtg setup to get data. To show data got
with mrtg I'm currently using routers2.cgi, a simple perl scripts that
will let you manage the visualization of data on the page (you can group
routers by site or some other mechanism). You can find it at
http://www.steveshipway.org/software/ it's simple to setup and really
fast.
The setup is simple, I'd wrote some scripts to do some thing in
automatic, mostly:
1) One script that run during the night and via cfgmaker (standard mrtg
script) create one mrtg.cfg file for each device i want to monitor and
create history archive.
2) one script that run from hobbit every 5 minutes, get the list of all
the cfg file I'm monitoring and launch mrtg with that cfg file (I need
cfg files because in the past i got some problems with mrtg exiting when
one error was found)
3) A script that simply send a green status to hobbit for each monitored
hosts and inside that status message i've put a simple javascript that
open a popup page that point directly to the routers2.cgi to open that
page.... 

The nice thing of routers2.cgi is that he can save an archive of all
your rrd file mantaining for example the 7 rrd (so you can check up to 7
day of full data), the last 4 rrd of the 1st of the month data (so you
can check and compare data of each month). You can also archive single
graphs, create a pdf report, do a trend statistical report to see how
the usage of network is going in the next few months based on istorical
data or you can directly export the data of a routers to csv file and
open it with your spreadsheet to analyze what happened.

It's snmpv2 compliant so no problems with gigabit interface and with
cfgmaker you can automatically create the configuration file you need.

There's no automatic setup so you've to create some scripting yourself
but the results are good and most of all you've some really well made
summary page where you can see all the interface of a router or you can
create some custom graphs with the data you need ...

Francesco



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kauffman, Tom [mailto:KauffmanT at nibco.com] 
> Sent: Tuesday, August 15, 2006 3:36 PM
> To: hobbit at hswn.dk
> Subject: [hobbit] Semi-unrelated question on network monitoring
> 
> 
> We have 14 remote sites (manufacturing facilities and distribution
> warehouses) with an average of 5 Cisco switches each. We've 
> been using cricket to monitor the traffic on these switches, 
> but cricket is doing a number on the cpus of the system I'm 
> running it on. And I've never figured out how to get cricket 
> and hobbit to integrate for alerts.
> 
> I just dropped devmon on my test system, and I really like 
> the integration -- but it looks like it's doing a number on 
> my test system cpu, and we do use the traffic graphs out of 
> cricket to see trends.
> 
> So -- is cacti any lighter in it's footprint? Or easier to 
> keep up-to-date than cricket? Does it integrate well with hobbit?
> 
> Should I be looking at something else?
> 
> My current hobbit system is an ancient (as technology goes) 
> Dell 4300 4-way P4 - 450 system with 1 GB of memory; my test 
> system is a slightly newer Dell 2300 2-way P4 - 500 with 512 
> MB of memory. 
> 
> Suggestions, please.
> 
> TIA
> 
> Tom Kauffman
> NIBCO, Inc
> 
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