What is Reddit's opinion of
Observium?
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments
54 reviews of this app found across Reddit:
Agreed! That or OpenNMS, thought I haven't tried that one.
It just genuinely seems like LibreNMS is created with the user in mind. LibreNMS' wiki is a fantastic resource compared to Observium's documentation, which is pretty bare-bones. Any issues there and you're SOL.
My thoughts anyways...
You say there is no official support for Observium, yet it's an option on your site with a Professional subscription (http://www.observium.org/services/). OP was about to purchase a Professional subscription even know Observium couldn't graph LAGs on his Brocade switches and if you hadn't have been a dick about it, you would have had another customer.
I really hope paying customers don't receive similar treatment when submitting a support request. Hell, even non-paying users (read: potential customers) don't deserve that treatment, unless they are exceptionally rude, which OP wasn't until you got his back up.
Linux does already a lot of disk caching in memory, so not sure you will get much out of it. But if you want to do as you say, you should just script it, you could use some stuff from this article.
Do you know exactly what they are looking for?
If its performance monitoring you can get a good idea from http://www.observium.org/
If it's usage monitoring.. ntop with a pretty interface like ntopng would be awesome. Here is an example of it running in one of my environments:
Use this: http://www.observium.org/
It also monitors linux, windows, qnap, synology, hp, cisco, d-link , hP, juniper and many more. Installation is as simple as setting up an Ubuntu LTS server and running a few apt-get commands. Then you jump into the WebUI and add the device -- just add the hostname, port number and SNMP string and off you go.
The only thing missing is e-mail alerting on fault condition. But for this I personally use nagios. I spent a long time trying to find 1 tool that does everything well but it doesn't exist. You always have to compromise and I wasn't willing to.
I've tried ELK, graphite etc. It's stupidly hard to set up.
start by looking into your local network.
what kind of connection do you have?
how many users?
what kind of firewall?
do you observe it?
when you've got the answers to those questions, then you can move on the the wan connection.
with that being said... dude... you're in the phillipines.
The Philippines still has one of the slowest Internet speeds in Southeast-Asia according to Akamai. In its latest State of the Internet Q2-2014, Akamai said the Philippines ranked 103rd on the list in terms of average connection speeds. Philippines only had an average Internet speed of 2.5 Megabits per second (Mbps) in the second quarter of 2014.[18]
I have been working to implement Zabbix as part of our monitoring system. From the documentation and demos, I cant wait to get it operational. I am also using Observium to compliment Zabbix.
Used Nagios, don't really like it's reporting interface. I once used BigBrother back when it's free, and I think it has one of the most intuitive monitoring interfaces I've seen. The only issue is flap detection, which Nagios handles a lot better.
There's been a reincarnation of BigBrother called xymon.
I'm going to try it some time. I've also been using Observium, but it's not quite a monitoring system like xymon/bigbrother/nagios.
if you're only looking for network devices look at observium. http://www.observium.org
Zabbix also has good snmp capabilities and building graphs on it is a breeze. https://workaround.org/article/tired-of-nagios-and-cacti-try-zabbix
I was a big nagios/cacti dude until i took the time to mess around with zabbix for a small project and i never looked back.
This stuff is the bee's knees. Now while I am unsure about the LDAP portion, it will do everything you need for monitoring and asset management, especially if your end users are on Windows, you use Cisco network hardware and most of your servers are Linux/Unix.
In their documentation that you surely read ;), it states you need to use the /etc/hosts file and add an endpoint via DNS name. That's what I remember when setting up my instance.
Graphical display - Sure, here's a subnet map screenshot from our current IPAM system. The layout should be pretty self explanatory, but let me know if you have questions. Efficient IP also has a similar display, but I don't have a working system at the moment to grab a screenshot of.
Monitoring - I would absolutely recommend against real-time polling done synchronously with page loading. Instead, you should have a background polling daemon that's periodically gathering up the data, and then you can just display the latest (or searched for) snapshots in the web UI. One alternative might be just embedding the appropriate links to Observium.
I saw Observium in another post. It looks really pretty.
Unfortunately it's not easily installed with something like apt-get... and the instructions for installing on Ubuntu: http://www.observium.org/wiki/Debian_Ubuntu_Installation haven't been updated for 14.04. I use hyper-V and Ubuntu 14.04 is the earliest version to fully support Gen2 hyper-v VM's out of the box... so I haven't tried it yet. I want that dynamic memory support.......
Apparently Apache has changed in 14.04 and I am not super familiar with Linux/Apache an I haven't found a guide for installing on 14.04
> •A copy of O'Reilly's "Essential SNMP 2nd Edition",
Yes, the O'Reilly book was helpful for me as well.
> Can anyone help point me to good resources of where to learn and practice SNMP?
On the practice side of things, the netdisco-mibs package is a lightly edited package of common MIBs that make them actually pass SMI validation. I've found it very helpful. You can get it here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/netdisco/files/netdisco-mibs/latest-snapshot/
Observium provides a decent, free web application for collecting SNMP events and analyzing data for trends. Get it here:
http://www.observium.org/wiki/Main_Page
What I typically do at sites I manage is deploy Observium and the netdisco-mibs package as a standard practice. That counts as "implementing SNMP" in my book.
http://www.observium.org/wiki/Configuration_Options#Map_overview_settings
doesn't say about doing multiple states... I think it is Lower 48, individual state, or metro area; if you used say Georgia, you might get everything except the bottom of Florida though...
I remember this from a while ago, I made a list of similar projects.
That's the one's I know of, if anyone else has found some cool ones, go ahead and comment.
Have a look at Observium. It will provide realtime traffic for SNMP enabled devices. It's very easy to set up, and will autodiscover network interfaces for a variety of devices.
If you like free...Spiceworks also has network discovery. It can be installed and ran from your PC. Obersvium is also a nice tool as well.
I would recommend Observium , its awsome for monitoring all kinds of stats via SNMP.
I'm using it to monitor my ESX host and the VM's on it, my pfsense router and some RPI's.
>I would like to hear what people have to say about these network monitoring topics:
>
>New useful features and capabilities in PRTG, Solarwinds, and other monitoring tools in the last 12 months
>
>New monitoring tools that did not exist before the last 12 months
>
>What is one useful thing YOU have learned in network monitoring in the last 12 months (doesn't have to a be a new technology or feature).
>
>What's else has changed about network monitoring in 2018, versus say 2014 or 2015, if anything?
I've learned that Observium (http://www.observium.org/) is my friend.
Not only will it graph traffic, temps, et. al. It can also be configured for alerting for any of the SNMP OID's that you walk/poke/investigate/request. This in itself, once you wrap your head around SNMP if you aren't familiar with it, is brilliant.
LibreNMS is pretty. It's been mentioned elsewhere in this question.
I've learned that open source software is becoming more prevalent and more refined as more people move to it's development (as people are becoming more jaded/angry/disappointed with (expensive) paid applications) and more often than not, I've learned that community based support is becoming better that the paid support that some companies offer.
I've learned that service and support beats the product, ten for ten.
Also, for the record, I'm a senior (age/experience) network admin/engineer that has been around for a very long time.
Hope that helps.
40 second polling seems ... very high. Unless the network-link to each device is extremely limited, a regular server polled should be done in under 10.
Are you using the poller-wrapper?
With the default of only 2 threads and 40 +/- servers, taking 30-40 seconds each - you'll exceed the 5 minute interval for statistics-gathering easily.
You could try increasing the number of parallell threads used for polling.
- Observium - http://www.observium.org/
- Rancid - http://www.shrubbery.net/rancid/
Combine the two and you're golden, for all of your listed requirements except SMS alerting. You can use Twillo for that though and hook in some email to send to SMS as well.
Are the VMs Windows or Linux? I too had issues, in both cases.
For Windows go to Services, bring up the properties for the SNMP Service. Go to the Security tab and tick Send Authentication trap, and add a new accepted community name "public". Restart the service.
For Linux I just replaced the entire contents of /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf with the example provided by Observium
Once I did that things worked perfectly.
observium (paid) can handle traffic accounting like this. Just buy observium and install it on a linux box, then enable snmp on the edgerouter and point observium at it http://www.observium.org/w/images/a/a5/Zlq0ms427g.png
Yes. This is required for portions of the autodiscovery to work.
Its not a big deal in the end (in my environment at least), just need to create A records for your LAN hosts which takes all of 5 seconds. If you have any questions feel free to ask.
From http://www.observium.org/wiki/Configuration_Options#Geocoding_Configuration
I you have devices in the United States of America you can use provices or metro view, the metro view (resolution = "metros") requires the US- in front of the metro code (short name or area/zip code). For instances if your location is Lafayette, IN, USA the region would be US-582, all other metro codes can be found at https://developers.google.com/adwords/api/docs/appendix/cities-DMAregions.
I happen to actually be in the US-582 code (must be a dev @ Purdue)
$config['location_menu_geocoded'] = TRUE; // Build loc$
$config['frontpage']['map']['region'] = "US-582"; // See http$ $config['frontpage']['map']['resolution'] = "metros"; // Some region $ $config['frontpage']['map']['dotsize'] = 5; // Set the d$ $config['frontpage']['map']['realworld'] = false; // Enable/Di$
$config['geocoding']['default']['lat'] = "40.441935"; // Default latit$ $config['geocoding']['default']['lon'] = "-86.912409"; // Default longi$
and on my devices the location is set as "### Street,West Lafayette,IN,US"
Seconding Cacti and smokeping; also check out Observium (also free).
I would expect any paid reports to contain at least the sort of output available from Observium or Nagios, if not Solarwinds.
If you enter all the information into a spreadsheet, it will become obsolete in a couple of days. It's worth the effort to set up a system that will automatically generate and update the inventory for you, like Observium.
I've just thought of another one called Observium, doesnt give you such a good map but lists everything fine. Better for servers/VMs as shows disk space and RAM and all that jazz but does do good interface stats.
you can get the free version as opposed to the cheap paid for one. Its basically the dev branch
> Ci sono delle volte in cui non sei riuscito a capire un problema di rete e ti sei incaponito per giorni? e se si quale?
Mille volte, il troubleshooting è una parte piuttosto importante del mio lavoro. Uno dei problemi più difficili che ho scoperto era legato a un bug sui firmware di alcune CPE che non rispettavano le specifiche del protocollo PPPoE. Un'altra volta abbiamo trovato un bug sull'inspection dei protocolli su Cisco ASA: ci abbiamo messo settimane a identificarlo con certezza. I miei colleghi che seguono la parte VoIP combattono di continuo con implementazioni SIP "allegre".
> che software/applicativo utilizzate per il monitoraggio?
Observium per il monitoring via SNMP. Ultimamente stiamo lavorando con ELK per l'aggregazione dei flussi Netflow e di altri log (ad esempio per prevenire DDoS sui DNS).
I did use Observium until recently I found it calling home to http://www.memetic.org, the dev did not really explain why well enough so we ditched it and went another way. It is good but just keep it firewalled.
So far you're still only asking for "monitoring" - which in this subreddit is like going to a huge supermarket and asking for "food".
Are those servers Windows or Linux? Are they virtualized? If so - what hypervisors? Are you looking at the basic stats (cpu, mem, disk, net, ping) or are you also looking at service-status, event-logging/handling?
Are you monitoring workstations? Patch-status? Wifi-access points? Network-switches? Storage? Backup? Web-services? Firewalls? Is this on one site or is it geologically distributed?
If you're not afraid of spinning up a Linux VM, have a look at Observium or LibreNMS. Its free, easy and quick to set up, looks "allright" and can do all the basic stuff. On an internal, managed platform you can catch a lot with their basic autodiscover as well.
Perhaps I'm overlooking the obvious but I saw no daemon to restart and I even went so far as to reboot the server...
How does one reload the config file after making changes?
http://www.observium.org/docs/config_options/
...makes no mention of reloading aside from specifics about syslog...
Thank you for your assistance
You can download the software from the wiki instructions here: https://www.observium.org/docs/debian_ubuntu/
wget http://www.observium.org/observium-community-latest.tar.gz
But the instructions on the blog post aren't going to apply to this method of getting the software installed. You have to do some more work to figure it out. Even the location of the files in the extracted package are different. I extracted the files from the tar.gz file and grepped for "raspberry" and here is where they are located now:
includes/polling/unix-agent/raspberrypi.inc.php
scripts/agent-local/raspberrypi
That's because it doesn't exist. :) The tutorial is probably outdated (it seems to be almost three years old). Try to navigate with your browser, and see for yourself: http://www.observium.org/svn/observer/trunk/scripts/distro
I just wanted to follow the commands presented below, but since the first one keeps getting me Not Found Error after connecting to the observum.org (as if scripts/distro did not exist, although this step is in every tutorial I found) I am really stuck :/
wget http://www.observium.org/svn/observer/trunk/scripts/distro
mv distro /usr/bin/distro
chmod 755 /usr/bin/distro
OK, this advice is based on assuming that you've got no monitoring tools at all, that your switches are manageable, and deploying new servers is no big deal. If your switches are not manageable then you've got big problems now and in the future - troubleshooting is always going to take a lot more man hours than it needs to. If any other assumptions are wrong then adjust what you do accordingly.
I'd set up Cacti or Observium to monitor all switch ports for traffic levels and error counts. At the same time, set up a few Smokeping instances on different switches, monitoring end devices which are going to be left on overnight. And have all the switches logging to a centralised syslog server.
The first thing you're looking for is to find out what is affected and what is not affected.
If you've got a load of bandwidth going through the switches, then trace the source and destination of the bandwidth using the Cacti monitors and a network map.
If you've got errors showing on Cacti, then you can go from there and fix whatever is causing the errors.
The good news is that packets don't just disappear. Corruption shows up in error counters. Congestion shows up in error counters. Dropped links show up in logs and error counters.
I'm not sure what version you're on then. Because the FAQ and my own experience say it's not possible.
With a default installation the poller does run as root: http://www.observium.org/wiki/Debian_Ubuntu_Installation#Configuration
> */5 * * * * root /opt/observium/poller-wrapper.py 2 >> /dev/null 2>&1
> sysLocation
I'm running out of ideas but I did a good for sysLocation and Observium and found this. I'm just shooting in the dark at this point and I'm sure you've already seen these configuration options.
If your windows servers have snmp running, Observium might be an option. It's mainly geared towards network devices (hence the snmp), but I've used it to monitor and graph linux systems with snmp running without any problems.
Because I have nagios set up for this already and also http://www.observium.org/wiki/Alerting
>Alerting
>Work in progress Please note that the alerting system is currently a work in progress. We encourage people to try it out and report bugs and feature suggestions to us, but we don't recommend using it in mission critical scenarios yet.
There are serious programs out there that will work on enterprise gear but are free. The problem is they are mostly based on SNMP, which is normally found only on better gear. Check if dd-wt has this technology.
If it does, look into a program called Observium. It should do a lot of the work for you but it is still something pretty intense.
quick glance I'd say accounting is where you'd want to look - but it's only available in the subscription version, not the free open source community edition
http://www.observium.org/wiki/Traffic_Accounting
Observium wiki covers this:
It looks like they filter that message, based on the config snippet off that link.
I took a couple moments to google the topic a little further, and I keep seeing references to that error and ipv6. No proper fixes (one "fix" was to comment out the line generating the error.). IMO, you're not missing much by not having that counter. From reading the bug reports on the net-snmp mailing list, this looks like it would need to be implemented in the kernel driver for that NIC (if I'm understanding them correctly - I wish they were a bit more verbose in their patchlist mails, alas..)
Were it me, I'd filter it out.
Yeah, the documentation for setting it up is a little broken. Here is a link to the config options:
http://www.observium.org/wiki/Configuration_Options#Rancid
Rancid has to have the same hostname scheme as Observium. If you are using CentOS, you have to install the PHP SVN package. Not sure on Ubuntu/Debian.
I'd suggest that you start out by setting up SNMP monitoring with observium:
http://www.observium.org/wiki/Main_Page
Note that you just need RO access to get started.
Then, you should setup a syslog collector to aggregate and store your logs. Someone else noted that NTP is a good idea, I agree so that you'll end up with properly timestamped logs to correlate against the SNMP monitoring solution.
With those pieces in place you'll have enough reporting to actually make an informed guess, the be able to modify the setup and verify that it your fix worked. Much better than swinging in the dark!
Then you can setup RANCID so that you can keep track of configuration changes, and you'll be looking like a real pro.
Observium is another option that's free that you can poll with using SNMP http://www.observium.org/wiki/Main_Page
Or if you're stuck with Windows servers like others have said, spiceworks will do the job.
NO MORE FAPPING?! oh, f ping.
http://pkgs.repoforge.org/fping/ definitely exists for centos6. try running mlocate to see if you have the fping binary. You might simply have to install it first.
http://www.observium.org/wiki/CentOS_SVN_Installation
yum install httpd php php-mysql php-gd php-snmp \ php-pear net-snmp net-snmp-utils graphviz subversion mysql-server mysql rrdtool \ fping ImageMagick jwhois nmap OpenIPMI-tools