So, After last nights SARA outage I am looking for another network monitoring system. We've been using Smokeping as a fairly basic tool. But hey the types of notification are only email. And actually only to one email address. Now it's broken for unknown reasons. There is a list of tools I have in mind we could implement:

• NAGIOS - In use by a lot of folks, many notification types, many monitoring types and opensource. Probably my best choice if I want to do this.
• JFFNMS - I installed this once, but it seems very bloated and targetted specifically to monitoring routers. But I like to monitor a little more with less bloat
• DIY - A do it yourself monitoring tool, obvious the most work, but also the solution that will most fit my needs

It would be nice if any of these tools could catch SNMP traps for me. Obvious a DIY solution would do this.

Good network monitoring also takes an external view from your network monitoring services from there. But I will first start an internal network monitoring box which will sit on a non-privileged box (thus no direct SNMP access to routers or boxes firewalled). It will monitor all public services and connections to the outside world. If it also can get the SNMP traps I mentioned about it truly can be totally outlawed of doing SNMP monitoring itself. Which is actually what I want :)

Update: We just installed NAGIOS as the monitoring tool of choice. Currently it monitors all servers and all services we offer. Monitoring of vital network equipment will be implemented in the coming weeks. More work to do besides building monitor software you know :)