Open Source Network Monitoring System

Introduction

Network Discovery. That is the main purpose of NeDi described by its author Remo Rickli, in 2001. It will try to discover not only networks devices but including any host connected to the network. It will keep the inventory and track any change. If a device becomes unreachable it will sent email notification.

And now after 7 years of dedication to open source community, NeDi touched down version 1.0. And here is the whole great features from NeDi:

1. Dynamic Network Mapping
2. Open Design - Run on UNIX, Linux, Mac OSX, Windows Platforms
3. Automatic Inventory and Documentation
4. Configuration Management
5. Simple Monitoring and Incident Classification
6. Track Population, the Movements and Traffic
7. Statistics at your fingertips
8. GUI supports Group Access, Multiple Languages and even Themes

For Dynamic Network Map, NeDi needs special format for the SNMP Location Settings. And it is flexible. I mean if you have your own format in your current network, then what you need is to edit nedi.conf. Find for $locformat and $locsep variables. Let say your SNMP location currently is New York:OSNSM:14:Switch Room. Where New York is the city. OSNMS is the building. 14 is the floor and Switch Room is the room name where your devices colocated. In this case you can format $locformat to “cbf” and $locsep to “:”. Read the rest of this entry »

Introduction

As you know ziptie is a good configuration management and Nipper is a good configuration audit. What about if both of them is integrated? Well, Ziptie Community has provided a good plugin called Zipper. So, right after we backup our network configuration, we can audit it internally from ziptie.

But there are some limitations right now:

• Run only on Windows Platform
• Output format is HTML only
• There is a problem to generate report on CatOS Switch

Quick How To

1. Quit from Ziptie Client
2. Download and unzip the Zipper crate (zip file) into the installation folder of the client.
3. Run Ziptie Client
4. Right Click on the Device to be audited (if you don’t see ‘Nipper’ menu, probably you put zipper plugin in the wrong directory)

Download & Resources Read the rest of this entry »

Introduction

If we talk about network quality, as i know, there are three things we should monitor:

1. Latency

It is the time needed for the sender to send a packet and get reply. Other term is Round Trip. Propagation, Transmission, Router are affecting the Latency.

2. Packet Loss

When the sender send packet but got no reply we can say it is a packet loss. A good network should have no packet loss at all.

3. Jitter

It is the variation of the latency. Jitter more than 50ms is categorized as high jitter.

To monitor those three things we can use SmokePing by Tobias Oetiker. The guy who wrote MRTG and then RRDTOOL. It is a software for measuring latency with a lot of feature.

The idea of SmokePing is it will send several packets for every round of test. And then SmokePing will choose the median value to draw it in the graph. The variation of the round trip, it is jitter, from the test performed will be drawn in the graph as a grey color. It is called the Smoke. More fluctuation more Smoke. For the packet loss counting, SmokePing will draw different color. Here is the sample from SmokePing website: Read the rest of this entry »