Member Avatar for MarkPollock

Hello everybody. I am trying to find perfect network monitoring solutionfor our company. I know there are dozens of such programs. Problem is servermonitoring software must be 100% reliable, this means I have to spend amonths for testing and then I may discover that software is not reliableenough. Software should be able to perform ping, trace, http tests; work with SNMPagents, receive SNMP Traps, monitor CPU usage and PerformanceCounters. Would be great to use WMI requests as well.

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Dani AI

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— wanting a monitoring setup you can trust is the right instinct, but no single product is magically "100% reliable." Reliability comes from architecture, testing and process as much as from software. As noted, a packaged suite can speed deployment; as hinted, the platform you run collectors on matters. Start by defining measurable goals: acceptable detection window, false‑positive budget, and escalation SLAs.

Design notes that matter in real deployments: combine active checks (ICMP/TCP connect, synthetic HTTP transactions) with passive inputs (traps/syslog). Prefer SNMPv3 for security and use SNMP Inform when you need acknowledgement. WMI is useful for Windows counters but has common problems — firewall/DCom ports, credential management and performance impact at scale — so consider agents or a dedicated WMI proxy collector for large fleets. Use distributed pollers close to remote sites, redundant collectors for failover, and retain raw samples long enough to troubleshoot incidents.

How to validate before committing: build a lab or pilot that mirrors your device mix, script synthetic transactions, and run trap generators and counter spikes. Do load tests on pollers (concurrent polls, polling intervals) and verify failover by taking collectors offline. Measure detection time (MTTD), acknowledgement time (MTTA) and repair time (MTTR), plus false‑positive rate. Only accept a solution that consistently meets your targets under stress.

Operational tips: tune thresholds to avoid noise, configure maintenance windows, integrate alerts with your ticketing/escalation flow, enforce NTP and credential rotation, and implement "monitor the monitor" canaries. Roll out in phases and keep a fallback for critical paths. With defined metrics, repeatable tests and redundancy, the platform becomes predictable and supportable — not perfect, but dependable.

Acceptance checklist:

  • Representative pilot passed under load
  • Traps/informs delivered and acknowledged
  • WMI/counters verified without excessive load
  • HA collectors failover cleanly
  • Alert noise within acceptable limits

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Member Avatar for suRoot

SolarWinds network monitoring tool is pretty well regarded and it's also available in different flavors so you can get the psedo modules you want

Member Avatar for TheNNS

oh iknow, linux.

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