Zabbix Good for Network Monitoring?

[asad747]

Dear all

I just installed zabbix 1.6.2 on testing. However after having initial look i am having a feeling that Zabbix is more focused towards System/Servers Level Monitoring.

Since last 2 days i am yet to find out how can i add my 7200 series routers on it. and i intend to Monitor many Cisco, Juniper, Foundry Switches and Routers only. Can any one tell me if they are using Zabbix successfully for NETWORK MONITORING ONLY???

I dont see much posts on forum regarding network equipments.

And if i get Commercial support of Zabbix will they provide me with the templates of network devices i ask for??

[bbrendon]

Zabbix is great for availability monitoring and metrics. If you're wishing to monitor many interfaces on many devices and NOT alert on them, I would probably not use Zabbix because of the SNMP features. There is no indexing intelligence in Zabbix.

Zabbix can monitor anything SNMP and alert on anything, but getting it configured might not be worth it. It really depends on what you're looking to do. You might want to consider Cacti if you just want to graph SNMP devices.

[nelsonab]

I have used it quite successfully to monitor network equipment, however it does require some initial effort as the SNMP features are not very dynamic.

[zeki893]

i monitor my network equipment by using an icmp check.

[exkg]

Hi,


We have some templates working:

http://www.zabbix.com/wiki/doku.php?...trib:templates

So if you need templates for other devices is possible to create.


[]s,
Luciano

[asad747]

Yeah i have seen this Template repository. But thats what i said, it has more template for System Servers rather than network switches/routers.

Anyways we will be monitoring Interface traffic/Chassis status and will be generating alerts based on them..

So i am trying to set it up. But its giving me hard time, i am still unable to understand how to change SNMP community for default templates. ughhh.. Such a pain.

[troffasky]

There are a couple of tools on the forums that generate templates by walking a device. As others have mentioned, however, Zabbix's SNMP support is quite static, so if the indices of what you're monitoring ever change [which is quite possible in modular network kit where interfaces can come and go] then you might find it to be a bit of a nightmare to keep on top of; you'd need to re-generate templates when things change. Ideally Zabbix would have this re-scanning functionality built into it.

I use Zabbix for network monitoring devices over the WAN, but while some of the kit is modular, the configs never change so I don't have to worry about interface indices changing. All I really monitor is reachability, latency and throughput. I only trigger on reachability. I also have several Zabbix servers deployed with customers for monitoring their servers and networks.

What do you mean by 'network monitoring'? Latency? Throughput? Availability? Error rates on interfaces? Interface status?