Network Management
Managing performance and availability of all your network network infrastructure is in most case's a full time job. Trenchant Systems can supply and install 2 tools in paticular, which provide huge functionality for minimal cost. These tools allow you to track how your devices are performing, and also alert you (using various means) if they should ever fail.
Using these tools will allow you to respond quickly to problems before the impact becomes severe.
Cacti Graphing Application
Cacti is a general purpose graphing tool to allow you to capture trends from a source of data. It has the ability to very quickly monitor your network and server infrastructure. You can monitor disc space on a server, email statistics and even server room temperature.
Why use cacti ?
- Capture historical trends on your network, usefull for capacity planning and capital expenditure justifcation
- To fix problems, you need information, cacti can provide needed information to help fix problem areas.
- Monitor bandwidth patterns to track bandwidth restrictions enforced by ISP's
- Cost effective data collection method.
Nagios Service Monitoring
Nagios is a host and service monitor designed to inform you of network problems before your clients, end-users or managers do. It has been designed to run under the Linux operating system, but works fine under most *NIX variants as well. The monitoring daemon runs intermittent checks on hosts and services you specify using external "plugins" which return status information to Nagios. When problems are encountered, the daemon can send notifications out to administrative contacts in a variety of different ways (email, instant message, SMS, etc.). Current status information, historical logs, and reports can all be accessed via a web browser.
Why use Nagios ?
Nagios has a lot of features, making it a very powerful monitoring tool. Some of the major features are listed below:
- Monitoring of network services (SMTP, POP3, HTTP, NNTP, PING, etc.)
- Monitoring of host resources (processor load, disk and memory usage, running processes, log files, etc.)
- Monitoring of environmental factors such as temperature
- Simple plugin design that allows users to easily develop their own host and service checks
- Ability to define network host hierarchy, allowing detection of and distinction between hosts that are down and those that are unreachable
- Contact notifications when service or host problems occur and get resolved (via email, pager, or other user-defined method)
- Optional escalation of host and service notifications to different contact groups
- Ability to define event handlers to be run during service or host events for proactive problem resolution
- Support for implementing redundant and distributed monitoring servers
- External command interface that allows on-the-fly modifications to be made to the monitoring and notification behavior through the use of event handlers, the web interface, and third-party applications
- Retention of host and service status across program restarts
- Scheduled downtime for suppressing host and service notifications during periods of planned outages
- Ability to acknowledge problems via the web interface
- Web interface for viewing current network status, notification and problem history, log file, etc.
- Simple authorization scheme that allows you restrict what users can see and do from the web interface