Title: SNMP Fun Date: 2016-11-27 18:00 Authors: Reese Summary: SNMP for all Cover: http://terraltech.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/snmp.png?76a024

#Cacti

For quite some time on the podcasts I listen to I’ve heard talk about server monitoring for example Nagios and Zabbix. Having no experience in this and it sounded pretty intriguing. I created a fresh jail on my FreeNAS Mini and got busy. Not knowing where to start I did a google search for network monitoring. I seen a lot of information about Cacti and it seemed to be a good starting point.

I started out with this guide. I failed to realise that the binary package for cacti did not install mysql56-server. I found a great guide from the good folks at Digital Ocean, they have great tutorials. After I got Cacti up and running the next logical step was to add devices. I found a FreeBSD it took a few times messing with the template and forgetting to add the cron script. Eventually I had Graphs!. I was able to find a template for my Mikrotik switch also. After figuring out how to enable snmp on OpenWRT as described here I had many data sources for the graphs.

After getting all my SNMP devices enabled and graph I was looking for more things to add. I figured all the systems log so why not try a syslog plugin. Under the Prerequisites I noticed > Cacti Settings plugin is required. After installing both plugins I was unable to get the logs from the remote system showing. I could see the logs coming across the network from a packet capture and verify they got wrote in the cacti host. Strange thing is when I went to install the syslog plugin I got a error saying I needed more plugins. One was settings the other was PIA. While troubleshooting this I skimmed the release notes and noticed this Plugin Architecture is now part of Cacti?? are the plugins or directions not up to date? pretty confusing. Before figuring out the culpret I talked with a comrade about the Cacti issue. His response: »Fuck Cacti, look at LibreNMS.

##LibreNMS

The landing page for LibreNMS looked more updated then Cacti, when I seen the live demo I was sold. There is no hassle with template in Cacti. By default LibreNMS has auto discovery that will scan the networks you define in the config file every 6 hours for new devices. The mouse over graphs are very nice. The website UI is way more user friendly. I have played with the alerts to send to Slack. I’m sure that I’ll add more extensions down the road. That’s all for now!

Thanks for reading