Network Management

The big selling point with cloud computing is that computing capacity grows and shrinks depending upon the load being put upon it. You typically only pay for CPU (by the hour) and storage (by the month) you actually use.

If your website enjoys a sudden surge in traffic, by appearing on the front page of slashdot for instance, then extra servers will be provisioned automatically. Once the peak load passes and more normal traffic levels return, the extra servers are automatically de-provisioned.

Robert Aronsson is the CEO of Intellipool AB a company with over ten years experience of the network management market. Intellipool introduced a distributed network monitor over four years ago. I interviewed Robert with a view to getting some insight into Intellipool’s experience of implementing distributed network monitoring solutions with their customers.

The interview was conducted via email. My questions are in bold with Robert’s answers underneath.

Q: What key factors determine whether you need a distributed solution?

The most obvious factor is network location, doing direct network monitoring over, for example, a branch office VPN is not something I would recommend. Depending on what you are monitoring it can be a huge resource drain on a VPN that should be used for “normal” office work.

Jane Curry of the UK based Skills 1st network management training and consultancy company has written a rather good open source network management tool comparison. It is a large PDF file ~150 pages, so you have been warned!

Kudos to Jane for doing the comparison, it must have been a whole heap of work. Enjoy!

A number of mid-level network monitoring products, like What’s Up Gold & Intellipool for instance, have recently implemented distributed monitoring features. Mid-level network monitoring products are now implementing distributed monitoring so it is affordable by a lot more companies.

Single Poller Monitoring

With regular network monitoring you have a single poller measuring network and server performance from a single location on your network.

One side effect of the increased competition in open source network management is that it is becoming increasingly hard to choose which tool is right for you.

With that in mind I intend to create a comparison featuring the best known open source tools to make the process of choosing the right tool a little bit easier.

I’ll publish the comparison in tranches so that, by the end of it, a comprehensive comparison is available. The first tranches will present more general information. As the series progresses more detailed information will be presented.

Almost as a doodle I thought I’d create a graph depicting the dependencies between a selection of open source network management projects.

Once I’d done it, it occurred to me how much just about everything depends on just a couple of projects or project variants of, RRDTool & Net-SNMP.

The main conclusion I draw from the above graph is that if you wish to create a thriving platform for open source network management, you’d better have something like those two hub projects.

Sometimes you fall over a product and it blows you away. Network taps have until now been exotic hardware affordable only by large IT departments with the budget to match.

Not any more! nmon have brought out a range of low cost network taps and network traffic analysers with NetFlow support. Looks like network taps just got affordable to the masses.

Why should you be interested? They’re just enterprise doodahs aren’t they?