Observer : Network Management And Monitoring

Introduction & History

Autodiscovering PHP/MySQL/SNMP/CDP based network management system focused primarily on Cisco and Linux networks. Capable of automatically generating network diagrams. Networks are automatically discovered based on CDP data collected via SNMP. IP subnet SNMP scanning is not yet implemented but is planned.

The main strenghts of Project Observer lie in being able to easily navigate a large ISP style network, but it has also been designed to be competant at monitoring Unix servers and services such as Apache.

I'm currently using Project Observer as my primary network management/graphing system, but I wouldn't classify it as production software, far from it!

If you'd like to test the software, please download it below and email me to tell me that you're using it! It's at the stage where a lot of user input, and development help!, is needed, so please contact me if you're using it.

Developed to work with

Cisco Catalyst 2950, 3548XL, 3550
Cisco 7200
Linux Debian / Ubuntu
FreeBSD (m0n0wall / pfSense)
Most other Linux and Cisco hardware

Requirements

Perl 5.8+ and SNMP::INFO
PHP 5.x
MySQL 5.x
Apache
RRDTool
fping
wget
Complete SNMP MIBs

Features

Connected-device discovery via CDP.
Aware of subnets to show machines on the same broadcast domain.
Graph interface traffic, packets and errors
Understands a simple interface naming scheme
Graph cpu usage, load, memory usage, uptime, users, processes for Net-SNMP servers
Aware of m0n0wall and pfSense SNMP limitations
Graph mail statistics collected on remote hosts using mail-graph and courier-graph
Collect data from Apache hosts using /server-status/
Can detect Linux, FreeBSD, Windows and Cisco OS types
Parses Cisco version strings and other OIDs to get hardware type, os version and os featureset
Heavy use of overlib rollover images to ease use
Generates primative network diagrams using graphviz

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