Network Management using Mostly Open Source

Network and Internet is an integral part of our everyday lives, but how does one ensure that the network works perfectly. This lecture will review a hitlist of the many good network management tools that we use in Solido Networks to monitor the network.

Contents of the presentation will be based on a review of an ISP / network service providers with walk through of the many places where Open Source has a critical role. Much of these are old acquaintances as MRTG and RRDtool, but the purpose is to show how Open Source, or primarily open source, can be used in a commercial business to create value for us.

The many tools we tie together so that we in the company result in a virtual NOC (Network Operations Center) and support to customers with a flexibility that no single commercial system can give us. The purpose of this lecture is to clarify how to create and use open source, and it will show that open source within network management is essential and mission critical.

We also use the example application Observium - which is a very exciting new network management tool, the tool use discovery and therefore requires much less configuration than traditional tools, and has a lot of unique features, including BGP monitoring that very few other tools have.

Examples of other tools included are: console server (conserver), Weather Maps from MRTG data, Observium, Rancid, syslog, grep, Perl, PHP, NetFlow, and proprietary scripting.