Thread: Network monitoring made easy

The open source world has lots of tools for doing different network monitoring tasks. For example, we install Nagios for event handling and notification., RRDtool for data collection and management etc. This requires one to install multiple tools on a system. which can be quite troublesome. Ground Work offers a completely unique solution to this issue. It combines the best open source monitoring and reporting solutions into a single package. It includes Nagios, RRDTool. BIRT for ad-hoc reporting, SNMP, etc.

There are various options available for you to deploy this' solution. Ground Work is available in' 32 and 64 bit installable versions and is also available as a virtual appliance for VMWare. In case you don't want dedicated hardware for this solution. then the second option is best for you. The minimum hardware requirement for a professional setup is, 4 GB RAM, 160 GB HDD. 2 CPU 3GHz or better, RHEL 4 or CentOS 4 (or above).

Features and how tos
Once GroundWork appliance is up and running. open its configuration page on any web browser and login using username as 'admin' and password as 'password'. It is based on Centos 5, so incase you need the root credentials then the password for that is 'opensource'.



User Management
Let's start by creating a new user first, who can monitor all the necessary activity on your network. For this, click on the main menu icon found on the top left corner and then click on 'Administration'. Click on 'Add a new user' link provided on the right panel. Provide the necessary details. such as username. password, authentication mode, etc and then click on 'Finish'.

Auto Discovery
Next is the auto discovery option which lets you discover all devices that are connected to your networ, like PCs, switches, DSL routers, etc. For this, click on the main menu icon and then click on the auto discovery option. For discovery of devices. GroundWork uses Nmap. TC,P and SNMP. You'll need to provide the range of IP addresses you want to discover on your network. You can also exclude certain IPs. For this, specify the IP and just select Exclude from the 'Type' drop down option. Once you have specified the IP address range. click on 'add range/filter' button and then on 'Go' button. Next it warns the network admin that the discovery option might have an adverse impact on the network. Hence it is better to run the discovery when the load on the network is minimum. Check the accept check box and click on 'Go'. Once the scan is complete, click on 'Commit'.