I recommend [librenms/librenms: Community-based GPL-licensed network monitoring system](https://github.com/librenms/librenms), which is Open source and free.
...and good, too.
In the default mode, all you have to do for configuration is tell it the names or IPs of things to monitor and an SNMP community string. It scans for every tree that it understands, and will rescan occasionally.
Does that mean that it has a library of devices so that it knows what SNMP stuff from them means? (I barely know how SNMP works).
Yes. That's called SNMP MIBs, and LibreNMS has a lot of the standard/well known device MIBs to parse out the details.
This has been on the front page for several hours, and it appears to be a $12,000 network visualization tool, but the website fails to show any screenshots or really much beyond an enterprise sales pitch.
Would someone whose upvoting this mind sharing what is interesting or compelling about this? I haven't been able to figure it out clicking around the website and 'Visualizing and monitoring everything on your local and distributed networks' is something kinda up my alley.
Used it once, based on java, worked slow... reminded me of other "enterprise systems" of the era, big, clunky, java-based and slow.
2/10, would not recommend. I liked zabbix a lot more, but then switched to nagios because "everyone else" was using it, and it was easier.
Thanks! Though I am still left wondering who is upvoting this link.
It's an ad dude. The upvotes are just a fugazi.
Once years ago a coworker set this up with good intentions of evaluating it and it ended up setting up a default automation which sent SNMP queries to a networked photocopier which triggered it to print some diagnostic page repeatedly until it ran out of paper overnight while no one was around. Anecdotal, but amusing to me and it's still the first thing that comes to mind when I see this product.
I've been using LibreNMS since 2014 and I even contributed to a feature, I can say it's in the top 3 SNMP monitoring tools, excellent tool.
Maybe it looks different on a desktop, but on my mobile the page does not show an actual visualisation, which I think would be helpful for me to determine its usefulness.
The pricing page shows the smallest plan is $12,000 a year. Given the lack of any screenshots or workflow info, I'm not going to reach out to their sales and demo this. It's way too much money for a complete unknown.
It is (or was?) open source. [0]
I know the company behind the OSS project was acquired though, and I couldn't speak to how / whether the oss version still receives much attention these days.
I've been managing multiple instances of the free "Horizon" version of OpenNMS for nearly 10 years, even contributed a couple of bug fixes.
It doesn't get much love from coworkers and it's an absolute beast to learn but it generally does the job.
It's got a LOT of bells and whistles including support for all sorts of Comms and IT gear.
It can be a tad clunky, pretty RAM and I/O intensive (Java) and the vast number of XML config files can be very daunting for new users.
But it largely does what's needed including custom detection and status polling of services, recieving and processing SNMP traps and polling SNNP metrics.
The built in graphs are useful but a bit old and ugly however it has Grafana integration and one day I'll look into trying that out.
It heavyweight and very "enterprise" - not necessarily going to cut it for home or small business use, but if you've got a huge sprawl of legacy systems and applications then it might be a decent fit for centralised monitoring.
Any tool that claims to visualize anything and does not show visualizations on the homepage is suspicious. So many product pages look like this these days. What does it actually do? What does it look like?
I'd like a proper (but not necessarily professional) network monitoring tool for a home network running on a rpi 4 alongside home assistant - is that it?
I’m not sure about this one, but I recently installed LibreNMS (an open source nms) on my home network and it does a decent job keeping track of traffic on my ubiquiti edgerouter. It uses snmp so should work with most routers, I imagine. I specifically set it up to tell me when I use more than a certain amount of data in a day to avoid data caps. It was a bit fiddly to set up, but kind of fun.
Zabbix is a good all-rounder.
I've heard good things about Uptime Kuma.
Zabbix is fabulous.
Ended up starting to write my own network analysis tool. Most of these tools don’t fit in with “home lab” type networks. Probably should finish it and share it here, might actually fit people’s use cases.
Is it somewhere on GitHub/mind sharing a screenshot?
If you want to drop $12k, maybe.
Network visualization tools have generally been a solution in search of a problem for me. At both work and home, my network is very stable and unchanging.
NMS systems are useful for monitoring large networks where something is likely to fail due to sheer quantity of devices/interfaces. Visualization is secondary to state capture and alerting.
I think these tools are generally more for alerting and the visualization is just a nice to have feature. At least that's how I've always used them.
"open"
As in "Open your wallet"
They were bought the failing NantHealth, then jettisoned a large amount of the talent and now blame being open source for failure...
It's almost impressive how the current OpenNMS leadership manages to miss the point of open source entirely. It's like they think "open" just refers to the tabs in their web browser.
Five clicks in to a visualization tool’s website I don’t see any diagrams or screenshots makes it challenging to want to kick the tires on this
Damn, not much has changed since I last looked at the project nearly 15 years ago when evaluating it against other management packages in an academic computing center. So frustrating to have all of the words words words and not a single shot of it in action, ya know, like you’d see it when in use.
There’s a link to their YouTube channel in documentation. That has a few demos, although I did not check them out
I never understand why people do this. This is a great way to lose your prospective leads to cat videos.
I don't find the visualizations shown on websites terribly convincing, so I kind of get it. Yes, you need to kick the tires to understand if it is useful.
[deleted]
"Helps you visualize"
Doesn't have a single screenshot.
And I thought I was the only one. Thought the same
I recommend [librenms/librenms: Community-based GPL-licensed network monitoring system](https://github.com/librenms/librenms), which is Open source and free.
...and good, too.
In the default mode, all you have to do for configuration is tell it the names or IPs of things to monitor and an SNMP community string. It scans for every tree that it understands, and will rescan occasionally.
Does that mean that it has a library of devices so that it knows what SNMP stuff from them means? (I barely know how SNMP works).
Yes. That's called SNMP MIBs, and LibreNMS has a lot of the standard/well known device MIBs to parse out the details.
https://docs.librenms.org/Support/FAQ/#how-does-librenms-use...
This has been on the front page for several hours, and it appears to be a $12,000 network visualization tool, but the website fails to show any screenshots or really much beyond an enterprise sales pitch.
Would someone whose upvoting this mind sharing what is interesting or compelling about this? I haven't been able to figure it out clicking around the website and 'Visualizing and monitoring everything on your local and distributed networks' is something kinda up my alley.
Used it once, based on java, worked slow... reminded me of other "enterprise systems" of the era, big, clunky, java-based and slow.
https://docs.opennms.com/horizon/30/operation/admin/webui/da...
here are the screenshots
2/10, would not recommend. I liked zabbix a lot more, but then switched to nagios because "everyone else" was using it, and it was easier.
Thanks! Though I am still left wondering who is upvoting this link.
It's an ad dude. The upvotes are just a fugazi.
Once years ago a coworker set this up with good intentions of evaluating it and it ended up setting up a default automation which sent SNMP queries to a networked photocopier which triggered it to print some diagnostic page repeatedly until it ran out of paper overnight while no one was around. Anecdotal, but amusing to me and it's still the first thing that comes to mind when I see this product.
Found screenshots of the free version: https://www.opennms.com/horizon/#iLightbox[image_carousel_1]...
I've been using LibreNMS since 2014 and I even contributed to a feature, I can say it's in the top 3 SNMP monitoring tools, excellent tool.
Maybe it looks different on a desktop, but on my mobile the page does not show an actual visualisation, which I think would be helpful for me to determine its usefulness.
The pricing page shows the smallest plan is $12,000 a year. Given the lack of any screenshots or workflow info, I'm not going to reach out to their sales and demo this. It's way too much money for a complete unknown.
It is (or was?) open source. [0]
I know the company behind the OSS project was acquired though, and I couldn't speak to how / whether the oss version still receives much attention these days.
[0] https://github.com/OpenNMS/opennms
I've been managing multiple instances of the free "Horizon" version of OpenNMS for nearly 10 years, even contributed a couple of bug fixes. It doesn't get much love from coworkers and it's an absolute beast to learn but it generally does the job. It's got a LOT of bells and whistles including support for all sorts of Comms and IT gear. It can be a tad clunky, pretty RAM and I/O intensive (Java) and the vast number of XML config files can be very daunting for new users. But it largely does what's needed including custom detection and status polling of services, recieving and processing SNMP traps and polling SNNP metrics. The built in graphs are useful but a bit old and ugly however it has Grafana integration and one day I'll look into trying that out.
It heavyweight and very "enterprise" - not necessarily going to cut it for home or small business use, but if you've got a huge sprawl of legacy systems and applications then it might be a decent fit for centralised monitoring.
Any tool that claims to visualize anything and does not show visualizations on the homepage is suspicious. So many product pages look like this these days. What does it actually do? What does it look like?
I'd like a proper (but not necessarily professional) network monitoring tool for a home network running on a rpi 4 alongside home assistant - is that it?
I’m not sure about this one, but I recently installed LibreNMS (an open source nms) on my home network and it does a decent job keeping track of traffic on my ubiquiti edgerouter. It uses snmp so should work with most routers, I imagine. I specifically set it up to tell me when I use more than a certain amount of data in a day to avoid data caps. It was a bit fiddly to set up, but kind of fun.
Zabbix is a good all-rounder.
I've heard good things about Uptime Kuma.
Zabbix is fabulous.
Ended up starting to write my own network analysis tool. Most of these tools don’t fit in with “home lab” type networks. Probably should finish it and share it here, might actually fit people’s use cases.
Is it somewhere on GitHub/mind sharing a screenshot?
If you want to drop $12k, maybe.
Network visualization tools have generally been a solution in search of a problem for me. At both work and home, my network is very stable and unchanging.
NMS systems are useful for monitoring large networks where something is likely to fail due to sheer quantity of devices/interfaces. Visualization is secondary to state capture and alerting.
I think these tools are generally more for alerting and the visualization is just a nice to have feature. At least that's how I've always used them.
"open"
As in "Open your wallet"
They were bought the failing NantHealth, then jettisoned a large amount of the talent and now blame being open source for failure...
It's almost impressive how the current OpenNMS leadership manages to miss the point of open source entirely. It's like they think "open" just refers to the tabs in their web browser.
Five clicks in to a visualization tool’s website I don’t see any diagrams or screenshots makes it challenging to want to kick the tires on this
Damn, not much has changed since I last looked at the project nearly 15 years ago when evaluating it against other management packages in an academic computing center. So frustrating to have all of the words words words and not a single shot of it in action, ya know, like you’d see it when in use.
There’s a link to their YouTube channel in documentation. That has a few demos, although I did not check them out
I never understand why people do this. This is a great way to lose your prospective leads to cat videos.
I don't find the visualizations shown on websites terribly convincing, so I kind of get it. Yes, you need to kick the tires to understand if it is useful.
"Helps you visualize"
Doesn't have a single screenshot.
And I thought I was the only one. Thought the same