Network Monitoring

So my thought was to use the Christmas break as an opportunity to catch up on some projects. One of these is to build some sort of home network monitor what would let me anticipate when the printer is down or when the cat has chewed through the power cable of my network camera(s).

In the past, I have tried to set up Nagios on a Raspberry Pi, but found it disappointing. Interestingly, devices enter/leave my network so often, I really need something that has some level of auto-discover. Manually configuring Nagios configuration files are very tedious.

I started experimenting with building a customer app with Python. I spent some time yesterday learning how to conduct network and port scans. I think this approach may have the most promise.

Earlier today, I googled and found references to a combo of NEMS (a Nagios extension) and Cacti. This article seemed to imply that Cacti would add the desired auto-discover, but after spending a good part of the morning setting it up on a spare Raspberry Pi, it seems to either not actually perform discovery, or my head cold is impairing my ability to figure out how to make it work.

During some of the set up, I was distracted by Fing and Fingbox. It seems to accomplish many of the auto-discovery and “fingerprinting” aspects I am looking for…except it appears different people developed the mobile, web, and desktop versions of the platform and their is a lot of overlap and circular references.

Things it offered that I like include:

• Auto-discovery
• Fingerprinting
• Internet downtime
• Security scans
• Identify unexpected devices
• ISP bandwidth speed tests