Network monitoring, at scale, is an age-old problem in IT. In this post, I’ll discuss a brief history of network monitoring tools — including the pain points of legacy technology when it came to monitoring thousands of devices — and share my modern-day solution using Sensu Go and Ansible.
Then: Nagios and Multiple Network Monitoring Tools
I’ve spent the last ten years as a consultant for open-source monitoring architectures. During this time, I’ve seen many companies, of every size, based all over the world, with very different approaches to implementing and migrating monitoring environments and tools. Especially in small and medium-sized businesses, the demand for a one-fits-all solution is high. While big companies often use more than one monitoring solution — the “best of breed” approach — this option is often untenable for smaller businesses due to financial constraints. And sometimes having multiple monitoring tools makes no sense at all — the more tools you have, the more things you have to keep track of. Many IT organizations feel the best approach is to use one solution to monitor their entire infrastructure. This monolithic approach, with one tool that offers many functionalities, like monitoring, root cause analysis, visualization, reporting, etc., is not wrong as such, but when there are requirements like the need to scale, true interoperability in big environments, and reducing the dependency on one tool and vendor, it’s better to separate these requirements and run a single interconnected solution following the microservices approach.