[CentOS] Suggestion on Network Management software with troubleticket system

Tue Aug 12 14:33:04 UTC 2008
Paul Heinlein <heinlein at madboa.com>

On Mon, 11 Aug 2008, nate wrote:

>> I'm looking for a network management software. And as the network 
>> grows it clearly becomes that manual notes is getting too tedious. 
>> Also an integrated troube ticketing systemm would be great. Any 
>> reference is really appreciated.
>
> For managing my "network" of servers(assuming what you mean since 
> your posting to a CentOS list and not a network equipment list), I 
> use CFengine to manage them(www.cfengine.org). Puppet(t?) is also 
> increasing in popularity as well(don't know the web site and doing a 
> google search didn't come up with anything obvious).

I'll second cfengine (available via rpmforge). It takes a while to 
set up, but it's a pretty sane way to manage configurations.

> For a ticketing system I suggest Request Tracker(RT)
> (http://www.bestpractical.com/rt).
>
> For documentation I highly recommend confluence
> (http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/).

RT is good; I've used it at previous jobs. Be prepared to install a 
lot of Perl modules. :-)

In my current small-ish setting, I use Trac for tickets and 
documentation. I keep most configuration files in a Subversion 
repository (an export of which serves as the depot for cfengine) -- 
and Trac makes it easy to link between wiki pages, tickets, and 
repository revisions.

I don't think this setup would scale to a large organization, but it 
works just fine in smaller environments.

> For monitoring I use a combination of an extremely customized
> cacti[collects 10+ million points a day](www.cacti.net) and
> Nagios(www.nagios.org).

Nagios, like cfengine, takes a while to get started, but does the job 
once it's up and running. Wolfgang Barth's book from No Starch Press 
can be handy to have around if you want an accessible introduction and 
reference.

-- 
Paul Heinlein <> heinlein at madboa.com <> http://www.madboa.com/