Dude alternatives

RouterOS The Dude
1

I have had a lot of fun setting up Dude the past few weeks. It works very well for what it does, but now I am finding it too lacking. I really need better graphing, and (at least in 3.5) there is no way to export data easily. The lack of an SNMP trap receiver is also pretty bad. I guess this is a case of “get what you pay for”.

Instead of waiting for the MT devs to get some of these badly needed features into the product, I want to move to a more professional level product before I spend any more time in Dude education. What are some of you using, or what can you recommend?

Thanks,

Nate Erb
Milwaukee, Wisconsin

2

i was hoping for the same kind of feedback … i did get a response in this thread

http://forum.mikrotik.com/t/the-dude-disappearances/35484/1


After using Ciscoworks for 7 years I can say with out a doubt it takes a lot less time to keep the dude server running smooth than it did for Cworks. BUT we have a linux system in place as well “NMIS” which is a really great program and it just works. We put RANCID, Drraw, Switchmap, Weathermap, SEC and some hand made scripts on it as well. The way we have both these systems running perform almost every function of Ciscoworks but it took a lot of time to get NMIS to do all the other things it does.

3

Cacti and NAGIOS both open source and are worth checking out. Predominately linux/web based however you can get both of them to run on any platform.

4

WhatsUp Gold Premium:
Database=MSSQL
Web Interface=internal or IIS
SNMP
WMI
Performance Counters
WUG is very great tool without shortcomings of The Dude.
http://www.whatsupgold.com/

5

GFI Network Server Monitor have one of the best functional, but missing map. Dude have one of the best map, but functional is limited.

There presented in templates for the most frequent inspections, no need to reinvent the wheel for such inspections. scripts is good for non-standard situations

check disk space - one of the most common tests, but it needs to reinvent the entire script and they are not universal




If it happened in the Dude to realize at least part of functional NSM, this would be a pretty good product.

6

I was meaning to post this here the next time I stumbled across it… http://www.netxms.org/ Have not tried it, have no plans to, looks ok.

7

PRTG is good. 10 sensors are free, and a further 10 if you put a small link to their site in your web page.

8

Free solutions:
Cacti
Nagios
Zenoss
Opennms
and others..


But I am using hust small linux script. Its scanning my network devices and if something is down, it sends me alert :slight_smile:

9

Another NMS I have found is Spiceworks http://www.spiceworks.com/free-network-mapping-software/. I have not tested it out yet, but it looks like it’s featureset could be quite extensive.

10

We are looking at Nagios and also Zenoss

11

Spiceworks gathers stats about your network and sells it to vendors for targeted advertising campaigns etc.

12

Of free ones,

OpenNMS, nice graphing, auto-discovery, supports multiple snmp communities

Nagios, hate the config file, but we can get it to fire triggers automatically (after much customizing)

The Dude, nice maps, and real-time visibililty into routeros devices.

This seems like 2 too many, but they all do something we can’t get the others to do (although I need to re-evaluate and see if we can get dude or opennms to reboot things now).

Also starting to look at Zabbix.

13

Thanks for that rmichael.. I wont be testing Spiceworks then :slight_smile:

14

Hostmonitor from KS soft

http://www.ks-soft.net/hostmon.eng/

15

I recommend Pandora FMS. in the opensource version you can do a recon and automatically register all the agents, with the modules that you need.
www pandorafms com