Observer is an autodiscovering PHP/MySQL/SNMP/CDP based network management system focused primarily on Cisco and Linux/BSD networks. It is capable of of automatically generating network infrastructure diagrams using link data harvested via CDP from Cisco network hardware.

Observer is intended to provide a more navigable interface to the health of your network. It will try to autodiscover physical links between Cisco network infrastructure using CDP tables from SNMP and it will also show devices are on the same broadcast domain using SNMP ip address tables.

Anyone who downloaded 0.3.2 should download 0.3.2.1 immediately to fix a bug preventing observer from detecting interfaces

Current version : 0.3.2.1 ( 27th March 2008 )

email : adama(a)memetic(o)org

News

11th April 2008
Just a screenshot to demonstrate some of the new IPv6 features

4th April 2008
I've added some basic detection and polling/graphing of Fortigate firewall devices. I've also added IPv6 address collection via SNMP, though the information isn't used anywhere yet.

29th March 2008
I've managed to deploy IPv6 across our network, so now I'm going to try to add IPv6 support to Observer!

27th March 2008
Observer 0.3.2 was released yesterday and 0.3.2.1 was released today to fix a bug preventing interfaces from being correctly added to the database. This release sees Observer beginning to leave Alpha quality territory and into Beta!

19th March 2008
I'm working on the default front page at the moment. It should give a nice overview of what's going on and what you should look at. Below is the current state of the page. I'm also considering providing a couple of different 'templates' depending upon what kinds of things you're monitoring, so it's more useful.

19th March 2008
I'm working on adding Netscreen support at the moment. All it does so far is detect them and add interfaces/ips. Hopefully soon it will poll them for data and generate some pretty graphs.

16th March 2008
I've added some basic BGP peer checking for Cisco IOS routers to Observer. It will record and graph updates from the peer, record their AS and try to resolve wether it knows about the peer in its device database (by checking the IPs it knows about).

Example Screenshot

24th February 2008
I've been adding some additional billing-related features to Observer. Specifically it will be able to aggregate the statistics of multiple ports into a single bandwidth bill using either Quota/Average, 95th %ile or CDR-style accounting. Data will be kept in the database in 5min increments making it usable for proper billing (as opposed to the existing RRDs which are not suitable!)

Example Screenshot

29th November 2007
I've just released 0.3.1 as I think enough things have changed to justify a major and a minor version change. Everything should now work under PHP5. The VMWware image is still coming!

1st September 2007
0.3 is coming along, I'm currently making it PHP 5.x safe before I release a new version. I'm also planning to create a vmware player image for quicker deployment in vmware environments!

24th June 2007
It's been far too long since I made a release, so here's 0.3.0-pre1! Lots of things have been changed, some new things are being discovered and graphed, such as temperatures and vlans. There is now the ability to give users access to single devices, though that still needs direct database manipulation. Hopefully 0.3.0 will be final soon and I'll have had time to do a web interface for users and permissions!

15th April 2007
Lots more work has been done tidying up the underlying polling system (which still needs lots of work :(). I've also written a basic vlan polling system to discover vlans on Cisco switches. Vlans are now shown on the port details section and in their own vlan section of the devices page!

7th April 2007
I'm getting 0.2.5 ready to release. Lots of internal changes have been made, including a reworking of the database, which is unfortunately incompatible with the old database. RRD filenames haven't changed (yet) though!

15th March 2007
I've just released 0.2.4 to fix a couple of installation and typo-related bugs. There are now one or two menu items which don't do anything, 0.2.5 should add functionality to those!

14th March 2007
It's just been reported that there are some errors in the 0.2.3 release, so I've disabled access to the source files. I'll track down and fix the problems and hopefully make a new release at the weekend!

05th March 2007
It's my birthday today, so I've just released 0.2.3! It fixes a couple of bugs which were introduced in the last release (some missing equals!). I've also added the ability to add/remove hosts from the web interface. To install, just untar it over your existing installation, it shouldn't break anything.

02th March 2007
I've been making a lot of progress in the last few days on the web-management side of things. I've added host add/remove/edit to the web interface and cleaned up the host removal functions quite a bit. I'll probably be releasing 0.2.3 sometime during the weekend or next week.

28th February 2007
I've just released 0.2.2! It's much better than the previous 0.2.1 release, but still quite far from general usage. We're using it at Vostron as our primary graphing system, compelte with its as yet unreleased customer-facing portal, so if you're interested in trying to deploy it properly, drop me an email!

23rd February 2007
I'm making progress cleaning up the code to hopefully make 0.2.2 a release worth trying! I even made a favicon!

5th February 2007
I'm now moved into my new house and have made some small improvements. A demo is available now at http://demo.project-observer.org. Many thanks to the people who are allowing me to poll their devices!

2nd February 2007
There hasn't been much progress this week, owing to the fact that I'm moving house. A number of small, but useful changes have been made and a new release will probably come next week or the week after!