Open Source Network Monitoring Luminaries Compare Approaches / Technologies at LinuxWorld

Yesterday at the LinuxWorld event, an impressive group of some of today’s hottest open source network management projects came together to compare visions / approaches for the network monitoring and management their technologies are tackling, and the common threads between them.

Participants included:

> Matt Massie, Project Lead, Ganglia.

> Kees Cook, Creator of SendPage.

> Ian Berry, Project Lead, Cacti.

> Tobi Oetiker, Project Lead, RRDtool, MRTG, SmokePing.

> Remo Rickli, Project Lead, NeDi

We’ve heard a lot of discussion about how open source is threatening the big proprietary suites, and competing on cost. But there were some other really interesting technology trends that these open source network monitoring luminaries were highlighting that are a lot different than the typical “Big 4” (Tivoli, Openview, Unicenter, Patrol) suites’ approaches.

For example, one of the distinguishing features of these open source approaches is that they are all “lightweight.” They’re all designed to be unintrusive, with low drag on the network. For projects like Ganglia, for example — which is optimized for monitoring clustering systems — this is critical for performance (any sort of latency or I/O overhead will cripple a cluster). One of the reasons why Remo Rickli created NeDi was that the tools for network discovery typically had a huge overhead toll (in sharp contrast to the lightweight script Nedi, which can discover the network using SNMP, telnet … and SSH soon … without dragging on the network). SendPage (an open source paging system) is also optimized for very low latency and high volume paging requirements (for notifications about network anomalies).

Another common thread is that these approaches are all very visualization-friendly. They’re collecting info, then spitting out the results in XML and RSS often, with great chart and graph capabilities. They are all geared towards the scripting languages and creating very dynamic, customized presentation capabilities. Ian Berry’s Cacti is the obvious example to call out here — it’s very much oriented towards advanced graph viewing interfaces and templates — and the ability to keep clicking down to more detailed views (that pulls in from RRDTool). Cacti has become such a well-known tool for graphing info, that it’s in fact seeing use beyond network monitoring, and in niche disciplines like seismic and medical data.

“When you’re trying to put together an open source system for monitoring your network, you have a very rich field to choose from,” said Thomas Stocking, Founder of GroundWork Open Source. “What’s really exciting today is that all of these disparate, best of breed solution creators are starting to really come together to explore what’s possible when their technologies are interoperating with each other. We’re sort of entering the next phase of the open source-based approach to network monitoring, and it’s great that all these creators are in close dialogue with each other.”