# network monitoring...

## green sun

Hi all,

Im an admin in a large school system, using broadband connections between several (40+) schools. Here's the problem:

The cable is provided free of charge from the cable company, but as such, they are hesitant to troubleshoot a lot of problems. They will often blame the problem on "too much traffic" (and they are probably right). However, we currently only use monitoring software that gives up average uptimes, and not real-time statistics.

Often, the cable network is saturated, and sites "drop off". Im curious if people know of good Linux software tools to help us monitor & deliver good up and down time statistics.

The current thinking is throwing money into expensive Windows monitoring software, I want to convince them to look at a Linux solution. I have a gentoo machine that I can use, I just really don't know what software to look at for this...

Any help is appreciated..

thanks!

~gs

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## klieber

Two that spring to mind are mrtg and mrtg's big brother, rrdtool.

--kurt

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## Neo-einstein

You really should checkout the rrdtool site as most of the monitoring stuff is based on that tool. T

There are a lot of different apps, see the RRD World part, for all the implementations  :Smile: 

I used cricket and cacti ! Cricket is not bad, very similar to mrtg thou, cacti is more visual (nice php interface), but harder to get up n running.

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## Hellfire

For simple average utilization MRTG might be easier to implement on your scale. We are all assuming, of course, that you have a SNMP capable device directly tied to the links to pull stats from. RRD/MRTG are both far more flexible than just simple SNMP gets but it's still the most direct and efficient method.

-h

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## rizzo

We use nagios.  It's the descendant of netsaint, only renamed.  We can monitor any service on any box, and it keeps up/downtime statistics for everything.

9 thumbs up.

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## green sun

Thanks for all the replies. I've looked into Nagios, and I think its a good monitoring solution, but I had difficulties setting it up... I'm looking into all the other tools mentioned. Thanks so much for the feedback!

PS, yes, you can assume that on the physical layer everything is set up... I just need something linux based to actually monitor  :Smile: 

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## kashani

If you're lucky you have some sort of snmp networking gear at each school. Even if it's only the core switch with hubs cascading off them. 

emerge rrdtool mrtg apache mod_contribs

start apache with "-D FASTCGI"

then go to my website and get the mrtg auto config scripts, init.d scripts, and some explanations on how things work.

http://www.badapple.net/tech/mrtg.html

Using these you can auto update your system nightly to pick up any changes or new equipment that may have been added. Adding servers isn't in the script, I'm a network guy, but it shouldn't be that hard and I'd gladly take patches.  :Smile: 

Ramin

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## krt

 *green sun wrote:*   

> Hi all,
> 
> Im an admin in a large school system, using broadband connections between several (40+) schools. Here's the problem:
> 
> The cable is provided free of charge from the cable company, but as such, they are hesitant to troubleshoot a lot of problems. They will often blame the problem on "too much traffic" (and they are probably right). However, we currently only use monitoring software that gives up average uptimes, and not real-time statistics.
> ...

 

Check out Cricket, an MRTG descendent.  The trick to it is that it doesn't generate the MRTG-like graphs with every data collection.. it generates them only when you're actually looking at them!  Very cool.  Its based on RRDtool collection libraries.. 

unfortunately, its not quite into the portage system yet (it requires a lot of things, like apache, rrdtool, mod_perl, etc.)

you can find it at: http://cricket.sourceforge.net/

I used to be in your boat.. monitoring several (30+) school connections.. MRTG wasn't cutting it (the server that I used was woefully underpowered.. it'd be generating graphs while the next batch of data was pulled in, only to realize that it needed to generate graphs again... oops!)

have fun!

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## kres

gs,

I've been a Nagios user since it was called Netsaint. I've used it at 3 different companies - all ASP's that where required to deliver SLA reports.

There really is nothing that it can not do. If you are looking for simple "is it alive?" with step-by-step escalation, notifications and logging - well, this is the tool for you.

Give it a shot and feel free to post me for hints. The new 1.0 version that is out makes getting started really easy - I doubt you will need me at all!

 :Cool: 

Kres

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## c_kuzmanic

Ntop is very good.

$emerge ntop

Also, to resolve your bandwidth issues, you might look at traffic shaping/QOS tools such as wondershaper, available here:

http://lartc.org/wondershaper/

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## green sun

Well, I've put to use many of the suggestions here. One thing I have not been able to come to good grips with is monitoring type of traffic. One of the issues we have is Internet vs. non-Internet traffic. We get federal funding for Internet traffic, and not for non-Internet traffic. Having numbers to report internet traffic vs. non is a *good thing*.

Because of vendor setup, we can't monitor the "outside" of our internet router, and all traffic goes through this router.. anyone have good ideas on monitoring this type of traffic?

NB: this is a real complex issue, and not one I'm expecting people to really understand... any pointers, even just how to do protocol level monitoring is welcome.

(ie: last month, HTTP = 70% of traffic, FTP = 10%, etc)

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