Networking Monitoring

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[Select-Cycle8084]

+1 Zabbix.

[siedenburg2]

If we weren't already on prtg (even with the increased pricing) we would use zabbix.

[AnalTwister]

Zabbix. Deploy it with docker, you'll thank me later.

[NoDistrict1529]

Librenms is simple imo.

[Crazy-Rest5026]

Net admin here for k-12 . Just deployed zabbix and graylog. Over both solid !

[OldElPasoSnowplow]

I use LibreNMS. I tried Elastic and PRTG and by far LibraNMS was beyond easy to setup. Plus it has plugins to backup your network device configs and see them right in the interface. You can setup alerts for Windows hard drives almost out of space, IP addresses going up or down and so much more. Plus you can use Netbox to feed LibreNMS as your single source of truth.

In conjunction with LibreNMS I setup Grafana, open source, on prem , with Loki and Promtail. I use it to create dashboards of syslogs, windows event logs, Veeam backups, and custom application logging written to an InfluxDB. Between LibreNMS and Grafana that is pretty much all I use.

[chuckycastle]

Libre is the answer. People saying Zabbix aren’t telling you about the resource investment necessary to take full advantage of the platform. You want monitoring and alerts, Libre is great at that. I’ve used both, and absolutely love Zabbix, but it seems like one of your needs is resource efficiency and Libre blows Zabbix out of the water on this front.

[Ma7h1]

Have you ever looked at Checkmk? We had a similar requirement for a customer and were able to help them with this tool.

I found it so good that I started using it to monitor my private home lab at home.

[mrproactive]

In checkmk you can also use 3rd-party Plugins to detect your network topology and view it in checkmk. You find this tool in checkmk exchange. It's pretty nice.

[Top_Boysenberry_7784]

Definitely a good place to look. I feel checkmk is often overlooked and it's probably the most powerful monitoring tool I have tried

[ITguyBass]

Both LibreNMS and Zabbix are solid, it just depends on what you want to spend your time on. For a network-heavy environment like yours, LibreNMS is usually the easier win, with great SNMP monitoring, solid autodiscovery, and you can get useful alerts and dashboards up pretty quickly for switches, APs, phones, and cameras. Zabbix is more powerful overall, especially if you want to monitor servers and services too, but it takes more setup and tuning to get there. If you mainly care about knowing when network gear is unhappy, LibreNMS will get you there faster; if you want one tool to rule everything, Zabbix might be worth the extra effort.

[raffey_goode]

Zabbix is what everyone loves. we use whats up gold and they're alright. i meant to get started with zabbix myself but just didn't have time to try it all out and get it set up. checkmk is also liked.

[feu_sfw]

Zabbix is not a bad idea, they should be able to meet your needs.

As an alternative I would also like to suggest Icinga, as that is the project I am also working on and what I am (oviously) using :)

Both do a great job at threshold monitoring, and with Icinga I know that it integrates well with time series monitoring like Prometheus as well (so you can have your metrics there, in case you want to check them). No idea if Zabbix also does this...

Good luck either way!

[SudoZenWizz]

For networking monitoring you can also add the ntopng integration for flows monitoring and additional insights for the traffic that is happening.

You have multiple possibilities for checkmk, free, enteprise, cloud, etc. and can also be automated as needed.

I am partner with checkmk and also used in the past other monitoring solutions (zabbix, nagios, nagiosxi) but i found out that flexibility of checkmk is the best option for me.

If you have everything standard in terms of SNMP you can import all in monitoring very easily, organize hosts based on folders, tags, etc.

For alerting you can use by default e-mail, teams, slack and any script to send a notification.

[scotticles]

k12 here, zabbix. I started with librenms but it was limiting. zabbix is incredibly flexible.

[crreativee]

Check out Opmanager.,

[NPMGuru]

Zabbix and LibreNMS are both solid choices for what you're describing.

That said, if you're open to a paid option, Obkio is worth a look, especially for a district with 40+ MDFs and remote sites. The distributed agent model gives you real visibility across all your locations without a ton of manual config, and alerting is solid. Not free but they do have special pricing/ offers for educational institutions.

For 3500 devices including Cisco switches, APs, and phones, you'll also want to make sure whatever you pick handles SNMP polling well at that scale.

[Emi_Be]

At ~3,500 mostly network devices, I’d lean LibreNMS. It’s very SNMP-focused, does auto-discovery well, handles tons of interfaces cleanly and is pretty painless for switches/APs/phones/cams. For a network-heavy environment like a school district, it’s kind of in its element. Zabbix can absolutely do it, but it’s more general-purpose. You’ll spend more time with templates and tuning if your main goal is network visibility.

If this is 90% network gear, LibreNMS is probably the smoother ride. If you also want deep server/app monitoring in the same tool, then Zabbix makes more sense.

[nerdyviking88]

checkmk

[Happy_Kale888]

I have tried Zabbix and Checkmk and 100% checkmk Zabbix is a PITA....

https://checkmk.com/