http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=560967

jimbus has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I'm pretty sure I can figure out what packages to use by searching cpan... what I'm really looking for is advise, best practices and such, so I can get it right the first time. There's a bit of pressure.

A county worker apparent didn't call before he/she dug and took out a whole bunch of our fiber and took down voice and data for Oklahoma and parts of Texas... which understandably made the Veep of networks a bit cranky, especially since our expensive alarming system never paged us.

So the idea is to set up a dedicated server that will ping all of our network elements and send SNMP traps to our alarming server when there is an issue. I'm currently reading about Net::Ping and Net::SNMP and should be able to figure something out on this. But the problem is I really don't have any experience with monitoring networks. What I need is advise from people who have done something like this.

  • Do I just set up a loop with a sleep in it and just ping each machine?
  • Do I send a trap each time I get a failed ping or should there be a so-many second tolerance?
  • Are the Modules listed the best for the job?
  • Are there any patterns or best practices or tutorials on this subject I should be checking into?

    Thanks


    --Jimbus aka Jim Babcock
    Wireless Data Engineer and Geek Wannabe
    jim-dot-babcock-at-usa-dot-com