Before working as a programmer I was a network administrator for a metropolitan ATM network. I had to deal with more than 500 network devices all over the city including servers, routers, ATM switches and cable modem CPE's.
To handle the daunting task of monitoring all the interfaces and services of all these equipments I tried a lot of tools from commercial solutions like IBM Tivoli, open source solutions like NetSaint, BigBrother and my own custom solutions with perl, mrtg and net snmp. In this blog I will tell you about my experiences in the field of network management.
The company I worked bought the IBM Tivoli Framework for the network management task. After months in trainings, setup, IBM consultants and technical staff coming and going and expending thousands of dollars in equipment,training and support we ended with a complete, ultra powerful and insanely complex system for network management. Too bad no one ever used it fully, not because we did not know how to use it but because we had no actual use for it.
All we wanted was to monitor a set of network devices via SNMP. The network monitor had to be configured with IP address and auto detect via snmp the interfaces, add them to the system, monitor them (traffic, errors, etc). The Tivoli Netview was more than sufficient for this but the sales guys at IBM would insist that we would also need the Tivoli Access Manager, Tivoli Identity Manager, Tivoli Directory Integrator, Tivoli Directory Server, Tivoli Storage Manager and lot more stuff. Each of these products came with a server, lost's of manuals, training, etc.
We tried to use these Tivoli things, since our company payed huge amounts of money for it, but no matter how hard we tried these systems had no use for us. Even the Tivoli NetView was not that useful. It was unable to autodetect correctly the interfaces of our CISCO routers and gave us ambiguous names and descriptions for out ATM Switches interfaces.
This really was not a NetView problem, the fault was on the ATM Switches manufacturer that put the wrong descriptions in their SNMP MIB. We had to manually edit the descriptions of each device interface and there were a LOT. The NetView GUI was far from fluid and each interface had to be edited one by one using like 5 different dialog boxes for each one.
The more we used Tivoli's NetView (the other Tivoli servers were accumulating dust and consuming power only) we were more convinced we needed to throw it away and so we did. As linux enthusiasts we started looking in the open source camp.
We played with open source monitoring solutions like NetSaint (now Nagios) and BigBrother and they are good but we must face it, web interfaces (at that time) were not the best in terms of usability and speed.
In the end we simply developed our own perl scripts with snmp and MRTG in linux. The linux console interface (with the GNU tools) is very powerful if you know how to use it, perl was perfect to handle large amounts of text data (mrtg cfg files) and mrtg combined with snmp command tools was simple and more that enough to our needs.
With our scripts we got a complete solution and we were happy but as time passed and people started finishing graduate school and moving to other companies (including me) the inners of out custom solution became taboo and black magic for those that came after us. Also there are now better tools like RRD Tool and Ruby that could be used to improve or replace the system.
A few days ago I read an article about Nagios and started thinking that these web based monitoring applications in the back end are really using the same tools I used like perl, mrtg, snmp. If only the interface was more fluid/flexible as to give the impression of a desktop application and real time monitoring it could become the next big application. Suddenly it hit my head: Wait! Web 2.0 is about exactly that!! make web interfaces more fluid and flexible as desktop applications!! I felt as if it was the discovery of the century and started to get ideas on how to develop such applications using Ruby/Rails/GoogleMaps/RRDTool.
Well my excitement only lasted a few minutes. After some thinking I realized that first: I have no time to do such thing, and second: Google showed me that this is not a discovery and that there are already implmentations of Web2.0 monitoring systems. See here, here, here and here for some examples.
Well these applications are still in diapers and there is a lot of space for improvement. Maybe when I finish school I will do something like this. With my experience as network administrator and now as professional programmer I may get something good...
No comments:
Post a Comment