This morning I went over our needs for a network monitoring system. We've looked at a bunch of different commercial setups, but they seem either pricey or not what we want, but usually both. We've tenatively decided to roll our own. Which may or may not be a good thing.

Our needs:
We need to monitor a variety of network devices including upses, routers, switches, cmtses, dslams, terminal servers, ds3 muxes, csus and other things like that. We need to be able to look at cpu usuage, temperature, modems in use, blah, blah, blah. Then we need to monitor thresholds and be notified when certain things happen. For example when a ds1 circuit zeros out or saturates.
My analysis:
Cricket/rrdtool could collect the data. We don't like rrd's pruning techniques. We could pull the relevant data out of the rrd data files and use it before it gets pruned.
Prior Art:
We've looked at netcool, nocol, and a couple others. I really like netsaint which I found in the project section. I've installed and I am playing. With some tweaking it could do what I want it to do. I also need to hook up with noc guys over at IU to see what they are doing. They've tweaked the hell out of mrtg. We'll see. Netsaint, rules, though.

We all need to think about burstable t1s. Monitoring and billing.

In other news, I've decided to more fully develop the linux side of my notebook. It has become my central workstation. I've needed to run windows because 3com's total control manager and cable modem manager run in windows (although wine seems to work more or less). Recent events have changed my needs. I've rewritten the cable modem manager in perl as a cgi, and we are mainly using as5300's rather than total controls. And I am going to be doing more developing. I've gotten used to securecrt and it keeping track of all the places I need to telnet or ssh too.

Personal:
I think every 8 months I get antsy. For more than 10 years I have either moved, changed schools, changed social groups or changed jobs every 8 to 9 months. Now I am supposedly all grown up. I am just passed 8 months in current job and I need to buckle down. I think I am over the antsiness, at least. Plus as my pal cdent says, I need to get in touch with my inner geek. That stalwart lad that hiked through the snow to the computer lab with dozens of disks to install linux way back when. We'll see.