OpenNMS also has an escalation handler, so if the level-one NOC techs don't take care of an issue right away, an engineer or manager can be notified to oversee issue resolution. Of course you can have separate logins for each of your NOC team, and you can set up an on-call schedule so that notifications go only to on-duty team members. You can set thresholds that indicate when a device is busy or down and receive a notification via email, SMS, IM, and so on.

A single server can monitor hundreds of thousands of network interfaces and produce nice graphs for metrics such as bandwidth usage, CPU, memory, and more. It's a highly scalable network monitoring system that is completely open source software. Top free open source tools for network admins: OpenNMS and Cacti OpenNMS has a place in every enterprise. It is known to work on Linux, BSDs, Mac OS X, and Solaris. RANCID supports gear from most of the big networking vendors, including Cisco, HP ProCurve, Juniper, Foundry, and several others. You can take a quick peek at all the routes in your organization and search for any elements that are out of sorts when you suspect a routing problem on your network. One of the neat features of RANCID is that it includes a looking-glass server. If you are a more dynamic NOC and make changes frequently, you can set RANCID to check hourly or as often as is appropriate for your company. If you are a stable shop and rarely make changes, you might have RANCID check once a day. With RANCID, you'll know whenever a change has been made by your NOC team.īecause RANCID runs via a crontab entry, you can control how often it logs in and checks your configurations. When it detects a change, it sends out an email with the details of that change to an address of your choosing. As it gathers and stores the configs for each of your devices, it runs a diff against the previous version to see what, if any, changes have been made. It uses either CVS or Subversion to store each new version of your configuration files.

RANCID (Really Awesome New Cisco confIg Differ) is a versioning system for your switch and router configs. Did I remember to back up my old config before I uploaded the new one? How late will I be staying up tonight to fix this mess? Top free open source tools for network admins: RANCIDWe've all had that horrible sinking feeling in the pit of our stomachs when we've copied and pasted a new config into a router or switch and it stops responding.

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