Open Source Monitoring 101- A Refresher

It's been an exciting year for IT infrastructure monitoring, especially with regards to open source tools. I figured it couldn't hurt to end the year with a quick recap of some of the popular ones that I think deserve recognition. Keep these projects in mind when thinking of IT infrastructure and network monitoring solutions in the coming year.

Data Gathering

The very base level of monitoring. A well-liked data gathering and collection tool is Colletcd, a small daemon that collects system information and writes this information into database files that can be used to generate graphs of the collected data.

Data Storage

RTG is a data storage tool that is designed to allow service providers to rapidly collect large amounts of time-series SNMP data and insert it into a database. syslog-ng provides a secure, platform-independent, centralized log of network devices, and can filter based on message content and customize data mining and analysis.

Data Analysis and Presentation

Some people underestimate the importance of the presentation layer - without the appropriate visibility into network issues, it is easy to miss crucial factors. RRDtool, which I can't say enough about, is a good multi-function tool that is useful for data analysis and provides clear and sophisticated data presentation and reporting options. It has strong graphing capabilities allows users to write custom monitoring shell scripts or even create whole applications.

Data Management

MySQLAdmin is a solid data management and archival tool and can be used to perform a variety of organizational administrative functions, including database creation and server status and configuration checks.

There are also several popular tools that I've mentioned before that span categories - to name a few, Nagios, a popular open source host, service, and network monitoring program and Cacti, a network graphing solution that provides clear and sophisticated graphing capabilities.

The maturity and traction of these tools signify that open source is a viable alternative to proprietary solutions. In 2007, I'd like to see open source monitoring better tackle the issue of scalability, as environments (and the number of devices that need to be monitored) continues to swell in the mid-market.