SNIPS

Ron McCarty

SNIPS, or System and Network Integrated Polling Software, is Netplex Technologies’ revamp of Network Operations Center On-line (nocol), which I wrote about in the August 2000 Net Admin column. SNIPS is a network-monitoring tool that provides both a command-line and Web interface to monitoring alarms. SNIPS provides alarm levels that provide an escalation of conditions based on the number of failures. This allows flexibility in reporting and prevents one-time anomalies (such as a network engineer resetting an Ethernet port) from creating alarms for network services that were temporarily unreachable while the Ethernet port was resetting.

SNIPS architecture logically can be divided into the monitoring function and alarming function. The monitoring function is responsible for determining whether services are running and reporting the status, which can be viewed in real-time by the systems administrator through a terminal or Web interface. The alarming function (actually an API from SNIPS that logs the change of status) can then be alarmed or simply stored for historical purposes. (The logging portion can actually run on another system.)

SNIPS comes with more than 25 monitors for monitoring both network elements (etherload, ciscomon, bgpmon) and system service elements (WWW, email, name services). The monitoring levels supported by SNIPS are: info, warning, error, and critical. These alarms are based on escalations of the previous level (i.e., warning is considered worse than info, and critical is the highest level).

SNIPS Installation

SNIPS runs on most versions of UNIX. For this particular installation, Red Hat 7.3 was used. SNIPS can be downloaded from http://www.netplextech.com/software/downloads/snips/. Documentation for installation is included, but here is a short overview.

As root, place the gzipped tar ball in /usr/local/src and unzip it:

gunzip snips-1.1