Project Observer 0.2.4 / 0.3.0pre1

Project Observer is an autodiscovering network management system focused primarily on Cisco and Linux networks.

Introduction & History

Autodiscovering PHP/MySQL/SNMP/CDP based network management system focused primarily on Cisco and Linux networks. Capable of automatically generating network diagrams. Networks are automatically discovered based on CDP data collected via SNMP. IP subnet SNMP scanning is not yet implemented but is planned.

The main strenghts of Project Observer lie in being able to easily navigate a large ISP style network, but it has also been designed to be competant at monitoring Unix servers and services such as Apache.

This is the third incarnation of this design that I know of, the original, Brockrigg, was written by Simon Woodward for Onyx Internet and the second, Kikker, was written by myself for Entanet International.

I used the Brockrigg system quite heavily whilst I was at Onyx, so its seemed only sensible for me to write something similar as Kikker when I moved to Enta. Project Observer has been written with learnt during the Kikker development, and will hopefully be a far more flexible and useful piece of software. With the exception of the unfinished diagram drawing code, Project Observer is far superior to the Kikker implementation.

Im currently using Project Observer as my primary network management/graphing system, but I wouldnt classify it as production software, far from it!

If youd like to test the software, please download it below and email me to tell me that youre using it! Its at the stage where a lot of user input, and development help!, is needed, so please contact me if youre using it.

Developed to work with

· Cisco Catalyst 2950, 3548XL, 3550
· Cisco 7200
· Linux Debian / Ubuntu
· FreeBSD (m0n0wall / pfSense)
· Most other Linux and Cisco hardware

Here are some key features of "Project Observer":

· Connected-device discovery via CDP.
· Aware of subnets to show machines on the same broadcast domain.
· Graph interface traffic, packets and errors
· Understands a simple interface naming scheme
· Graph cpu usage, load, memory usage, uptime, users, processes for Net-SNMP servers
· Aware of m0n0wall and pfSense SNMP limitations
· Graph mail statistics collected on remote hosts using mail-graph and courier-graph
· Collect data from Apache hosts using /server-status/
· Can detect Linux, FreeBSD, Windows and Cisco OS types
· Parses Cisco version strings and other OIDs to get hardware type, os version and os featureset
· Heavy use of overlib rollover images to ease use
· Generates primative network diagrams using graphviz