non SNMP Network and Traffic Monitoring is it viable.
 

Hi Everyone;

First forum post here so..Hi!

So here is what I'm considering. I would like to be able to monitor a few things on my home network. Some of them are very simple and some I stare blankly at the moon and cry myself to sleep over.

1. Monitor Process and Systems for a varity of WinXX based systems and some linux systems I have (my plan here is Nagios with some MRTG) to monitor process loads, and network traffic. I visualize this to be a modest SNMP setup with little difficulty.

2. There are some devices in the house that cause me some concern as I'm not sure how to approach them. There are some iphones, ipods etc, an android tablet, 2 playstation 3's (not modded or anything like that), and some older xboxes, running xbmc on them for media server purposes.

It's the second group that troubles me a bit, I'm not really sure how to approach the monitoring of those systems, as I believe them to be all non snmp as such I don't know what information they will report.

I considered that Squid or some other proxy might work. I supposed I could then feed squid reports into nagios for display.

I don't want to use a Windows based system, as I would prefer to have it on a linux box. I would also prefer that it be browser based so I can keep it up on a monitor at my station, so I can feel like the home NOC :P.

I guess what I'm looking for are some thoughts and considerations on this matter, as I'm reasonably certian that I'm not the first to think of this.

Thanks for all your feedback in advance.

Cheers,
Kali

Which is how I'd approach it too. Nagios can give you graph output as well, so MRTG may not be needed (your call...depends on what you're looking for), and you may also want to look at Zabbix. Both web-based with SNMP support.
If they don't support SNMP, they will return ZERO information. Also, the tablets and phones are probably using DHCP for addressing (unless you've told them otherwise), so all you'd really be able to get out of them is a basic PING test to see if they're up or down. You'll get LOADS of false positives for system down events (like when your iPhone leaves the house? Tablet batteries run down?), so I'm not sure it's worth it.
Squid can be reported on via SARG and other reporting mechanisms. There are some Nagios squid plugins that you may want to look at, that may fit your needs.
Well, this is all certainly doable....the better question to me would be "why"? Unless you've got lots of folks using your home systems all the time, there's not much point in monitoring all of it. And if they're at your house, chances are they'll just call you and say "Your PS3 isn't working...what do I do?"

Ok thanks I figured Iwas on the right track there

Yes that is what I was thinking here as well, I have considered picking up an inexpensive Cisco Switch that will allow me to monitor per port routing, as well I was also considering getting a new router that supported something like tomato or like product

The why is easy, we have a lot of people in and ouit of the house, and here in Canada I have bandwidth concerns (I am currenlty capped at 80 gigabytes/month, and pay a pentalty for each gig over), I want to better understand the daily utilization of our internet connection, so I can show certian people (read kids)a visual representation of thier impact to this.

Plus it is fun, it keeps my skills in check as i'm pretty rusty and not currently in the trade of admining system right now.

Definitely.
Well, you CAN monitor network ports on most SOHO devices now, and get traffic statistics, but I thought you wanted to monitor the devices further upstream. You shouldn't have to change routers to do this. Also, you can just assign the various 'transient' devices static IP addresses in your router, so they get the same one each time, which would make monitoring easy.
That makes sense, but for that, I'd just go simpler and use squid to proxy all your traffic, then use sarg to run reports on it, based on device/ip address, which would then show who is using what data, without the need for nagios or SNMP.
The fun aspect I understand too. :)

You might want to consider taking a look at the FAN project - http://www.fullyautomatednagios.org which is based on CentOS and makes for an easy installation of Nagios, Nagvis and Centreon.