I think anybody looking for a be-all-end-all solution will find nothing but 
heartburn.

different suites have different strong suits, and deciding you are going to 
pursue one and ignore all others may mean living without a feature or set of 
features you may find really useful or eventually necessary. but maintaining 
multiple complete NMSes isn’t really tenable either.

all of that said, we use a combination of a couple. Nagios/Icinga because it’s 
been around forever (both in the world and in our network), and the power of 
script based checks, being able to write your own handlers and pretty much just 
leverage it as a framework you can shove questions into and get regular answers 
from is invaluable.

LibreNMS gives us the best pretty pictures, letting us monitor much much more 
than just interface traffic, out of the box. much more than cacti is capable of 
without a ton of work (i.e. down to the tx/rx power and temperature readings of 
individual SFPs). it scales relatively well; at least in theory. i will be able 
to tell you for sure later this year as we are near the limits of what we can 
monitor with a single polling device. alerting out of Libre into Slack has 
proven quite fantastic. we can spawn threads attached to anything from a BGP 
peer dropping or a CPU alert as we move to triage and solve, even if we are in 
the field or meetings or whatever.

we also still have cacti around for random one-offs. as great as Libre is, its 
poller can be a bit intense for some devices; so in those cases it’s safer for 
us to just have cacti graph the one or two OIDs we need specifically, without 
trolling all the other available sensors.

we ran OpenNMS for a bit, but it proved way to dumb to maintain a large (and 
growing) complex network, without dedicating at least one or two people to the 
care and feeding of it.

-nick

—
Nick Peelman
Network Engineer | Enhanced Telecommunications Corp.
812-222-0169<tel:812-222-0169> | npeel...@etc1.net<mailto:npeel...@etc1.net> | 
www.etczone.com<http://www.etczone.com/>

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 15, 2018, at 09:49, Colton Conor 
<colton.co...@gmail.com<mailto:colton.co...@gmail.com>> wrote:

We are looking for a new network monitoring system. Since there are so many 
operators on this list, I would like to know which NMS do you use and why? Is 
there one that you really like, and others that you hate?

For free options (opensouce), LibreNMS and NetXMS come highly recommended by 
many wireless ISPs on low budgets. However, I am not sure the commercial 
options available nor their price points.


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