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Re: Network Monitoring Tools

  • From: William B. Norton
  • Date: Fri Jul 11 11:42:34 1997

Hi David -

Your question is well-timed.  I just put up for anonymous FTP the Rover 4.0
code (beta).

The previous versions of Internet Rover code has been in use since the
NSFNET days and has been downloaded and put in production in many locations
around the world.  The original idea was to code a simple way to perform
tests on network devices and create alerts when the tests failed.  Many
folks have added tests to the package and contributed them back for
incorporation into the software.  Current tests include:

WWW, Named, SMTP, FTP, TELNET, PING, PORT, etc.

Basically, if you can make a subroutine that returns a Pass/Fail, it can be
incorporated into the code. These earlier versions of the code has scaled
to about a thousand nodes in our NOC.

This 4.0 version uses SNMP to externalize the list of alerts that Rover
generates to centralized network management station(s) for consolidation
into a single aggregate alert screen.  This allows one to distribute the
monitoring function as appropriate and only pull back the list of what is
broken in the area.  The cool thing is you can then build your hierarchy of
management stations in a lego block approach.

Currently the code has only been ported/tested on Solaris and SunOS systems.

The real release is going out after some other folks verify that it works
in their environment -- let me know your experiences with it... It
shouldn't take long to install:  edit a couple files and type ./configure;make

The beta code and documentation is at:
http://www.merit.edu/internet.tools/rover

Hope this helps.

Bill

At 10:04 AM 7/11/97 -0400, David Hares - ADP Autonet wrote:
>
>I would like to solicit recommendations for network monitoring utilities. 
>We are attempting to monitor around a thousand nodes (and growing).  We're
>using SunNet Manager since we're primarily a Sun shop.  The problem is
>it's taking a full time programmer (me) to keep up with the changes in our
>net.  It doesn't seem like it ought to take that much effort.  The
>operations staff is competent and ought to be able to configure a
>monitoring utility.  Also, SunNet seems to be a cpu hog.  At the rate it
>uses up cpu, I'll need a giga-SPARC by next year. 
>
>So, the question of the day is what's in use and really works ?  I'm not
>enamored of cute GUI interfaces, particularly ones that try to draw my
>network out before giveing any useful information.  Among other problems,
>running these over a less than wonderful connection to my hotel room is
>painful.  Something that scales well into multipe thousands of nodes would
>be nice.
>
>Thanks in advance.
> --
>David L. Hares, Senior Staff Programmer
>AutoNet                                    Phone: (313) 995-6539
>175 Jackson Plaza                          FAX  : (313) 995-6458
>Ann Arbor, MI  48106 (USA)                 Email: [email protected]
>
>
>
--------------------------------------------------------------
William B. Norton	<[email protected]>		(313) 764-9430