IT Troubleshooter | Harper Mann » August 2006

August 17, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Open Source Network Monitoring Luminaries Compare Approaches / Technologies at LinuxWorld

TAGS: Networking

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."

Posted by Harper Mann on August 17, 2006 03:04 PM

August 01, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Cisco's Network Management Push Raises More Questions than Answers

TAGS: Networking

In Q4, another InfoWorld blogger noted Cisco's 'rolling thunder' in systems management. According to Greg Nawrocki:

"I think it's really interesting to consider the consolidation that will likely take place in the systems management realm in the next year. Over the last couple of years, there's been an explosion of vendors with dynamic server provisioning capabilities -- Opsware, Cassatt, Platform, Data Synapse, Levanta, Egenera, Qlusters, BladeLogic, etc., etc. -- the environment is ripe for acquisitions, and Cisco is one of the looming giants that's up to the task. To me, the question is not 'if' Cisco will continue to beef up its systems management capabilities -- but 'when' they will officially acknowledge that they intend to compete head to head with the Tivolis, Openviews, etc. of the world. As highly distributed applications become normalized in enterprise -- the value of 'intelligence in the network' keeps getting more compelling for enterprise customers."

That speculation that Cisco was to compete with the "Big 4" continued in a Network World article by Lynn Haber, which pointed out that Cisco's acquisition of Sheer improved the interoperability between Cisco gear and system management vendors.

In that same article, Jim Hull, VP of engineering at MasterCard, said, "If Cisco does focus its strategy on open standards that will let users pick the best management tools."

But when I read Denise Dubie's Q&A ("Cisco Exec Touts Network Management Push") with Cliff Meltzer, Sr. VP of the Network Management Technology Group, today on Network World, I felt like her questions were all the right track, but some of the answers seemed a bit opaque. For example, on the question about how Cisco's new management technology will "allow you to manage other vendor gear."

I would like to hear more specifically how Cisco intends to handle the practical technical issues that are common to environments with a large diversity of different network hardware. For example, how will they make it easier to poll different MIB values across Foundry, Juniper and other competitors' equipment?

How will Cisco's management product deal with competitors' network security? For example, firewalls blocking the monitoring protocols. A customer might have a router built in '99, and it will respond to SNMP and ICMP -- but it may not have a web interface or HTTP. Whereas a modern router will have an HTTP interface, may have other configuration interfaces -- where you can send to it with usual versioning questions.

Those are the types of common issues that a network admin runs into in environments with heterogeneous equipment. It would be helpful to hear Cisco explain its management product roadmap a bit more specifically to that degree of granularity.

Cisco talks about handling multiple vendor gear, but their Network Analyst Modules page -- the sort of engines, if you will, for their monitoring solutions -- also seems to say that it monitors traffic exclusively for Cisco Catalyst Switches and Routers.

I am intrigued by Cisco's forays into network management. But until there's a little more direct evidence, it seems like the story their telling about managing heterogeneous environments is a bit more spin than substance.

I think there is room for improvement in the Network and Systems Management arena, but I wonder about gargantuan companies' interests in general solutions. It's too easy to sow in small technical problems where all the parts work much better from the one vendor and maddeningly almost (but not quite) work for everybody else.

This is one of the advantages of Open Source. Because of the way it's structured, it's to everyone's advantage to work with as many other systems as possible. That incentive just doesn't exist for commercial products, particularly as the behemoths take over more and more of any one domain and start to spill over into new domains.

Posted by Harper Mann on August 1, 2006 12:17 PM