9 ms·

Out of curiosity, can you give some examples of open-source monitoring tools that large-scale ISPs use?

walrus01 6y ago
the first and most important thing is to have the correct network architecture and engineering to make effective use of the tools, and not have a network that needs a lot of babysitting in the first place. after that's taken care of as an over-arching and continual business process: there is no one single god box piece of software that is the be-all and do-all of network management/monitoring for an ISP. Some things come close, such as LibreNMS when used as the sole tool for a small ISP. But most often it is a patchwork quilt of many different things, each used for a discrete purpose. in no particular order: opennms a combination of (influxdb + telegraf + grafana) librenms provisioning and automation tools like ansible various in house things built on traditional RRA files and rrdtool tools like netbox for keeping track of datacenter customers/hosting environments phpipam or nipap for IP address management various self-hostable wiki software packages for internal documentation various types of self-hostable ticketing systems, monitoring systems that integrate with a customized asterisk system for NOC phone workflow 4 or 5 different tools that fill the same role as smokeping wireshark lots of different things for analyzing netflow data (Elastiflow or other) ELK stack stuff, elasticsearch/logstash/kibana, customized as needed. in house setups for openstreetmap tile servers and map presentation, to pull data from back-end mariadb databases and present them on monitoring displays. GIS software like QGIS and a PostGIS backend lots of different possible things done with custom code and postgresql, mysql/mariadb, or similar if you go through the PDF slideshows for the powerpoint decks at the last 4-5 years of the NANOG, RIPE and APNIC conferences you'll see discussion of some of the most popular network automation and monitoring tools.
gerdesj 6y ago
I'm not a large scale ISP but I do have to monitor quite a lot of stuff. You'd be amazed at how much you can monitor with Nagios/Icinga(1,2). They are written in C but call a lot of external stuff written in whatever you fancy and that's the power, right there. Bodge upon bodge! There's no single technology in these beasties. The interface between the system and the plugins is very basic to say the least, so you can throw whatever at it as you require. I'm a sysadmin not a programmer and need to get jobs done. We currently use Icinga 1 with a dash of Netdisco and I intend to migrate to Icinga 2 with DIrector etc. That said, I have dallied with OpenNMS many times ever since the project began - it's too good to ignore. Zabbix also turns my head quite often.
- walrus01 6y ago
  opennms is simultaneously arcane weirdly laid out a massive java memory hog (thankfully, RAM is cheap, giving an opennms VM 16GB of memory isn't a big deal anymore) extremely powerful something that has 450+ pages of documentation totally open source extensible to support monitoring of massive international-scale networks

the first and most important thing is to have the correct network architecture and engineering to make effective use of the tools, and not have a network that needs a lot of babysitting in the first place. after that's taken care of as an over-arching and continual business process: there is no one single god box piece of software that is the be-all and do-all of network management/monitoring for an ISP. Some things come close, such as LibreNMS when used as the sole tool for a small ISP. But most often it is a patchwork quilt of many different things, each used for a discrete purpose. in no particular order: opennms a combination of (influxdb + telegraf + grafana) librenms provisioning and automation tools like ansible various in house things built on traditional RRA files and rrdtool tools like netbox for keeping track of datacenter customers/hosting environments phpipam or nipap for IP address management various self-hostable wiki software packages for internal documentation various types of self-hostable ticketing systems, monitoring systems that integrate with a customized asterisk system for NOC phone workflow 4 or 5 different tools that fill the same role as smokeping wireshark lots of different things for analyzing netflow data (Elastiflow or other) ELK stack stuff, elasticsearch/logstash/kibana, customized as needed. in house setups for openstreetmap tile servers and map presentation, to pull data from back-end mariadb databases and present them on monitoring displays. GIS software like QGIS and a PostGIS backend lots of different possible things done with custom code and postgresql, mysql/mariadb, or similar if you go through the PDF slideshows for the powerpoint decks at the last 4-5 years of the NANOG, RIPE and APNIC conferences you'll see discussion of some of the most popular network automation and monitoring tools.

gerdesj 6y ago

I'm not a large scale ISP but I do have to monitor quite a lot of stuff. You'd be amazed at how much you can monitor with Nagios/Icinga(1,2). They are written in C but call a lot of external stuff written in whatever you fancy and that's the power, right there. Bodge upon bodge! There's no single technology in these beasties. The interface between the system and the plugins is very basic to say the least, so you can throw whatever at it as you require. I'm a sysadmin not a programmer and need to get jobs done. We currently use Icinga 1 with a dash of Netdisco and I intend to migrate to Icinga 2 with DIrector etc. That said, I have dallied with OpenNMS many times ever since the project began - it's too good to ignore. Zabbix also turns my head quite often.

walrus01 6y ago
opennms is simultaneously arcane weirdly laid out a massive java memory hog (thankfully, RAM is cheap, giving an opennms VM 16GB of memory isn't a big deal anymore) extremely powerful something that has 450+ pages of documentation totally open source extensible to support monitoring of massive international-scale networks