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HIDS SNMP Manager

HIDS SNMP Manager is a tool to efficiently query, store and visualize relevant interface data from devices.

It was written to fix several problem that were encountered in day-to-day operation of a provider-network and housing, mainly:

• many Network Management Tools do not, by default, capture information for all interfaces present in devices monitored - as Murphy would state in a law, the one interface you need information on is not queried
• storing interface performance data typically requires rather large files if high detail and longer time frames are required
• to reduce the amount of data on disk, many tools compress stored performance values by averaging the values in multiple steps, losing details along the way - forget about pin-pointing any short event occurring at more or less constant intervals
• creating averages causes high I/O requirements, as well as CPU load

To remedy these deficiencies, this tool package was created. It currently consists of several components:

• the [HIDS] routines take care of the storage of the interface data; with some additional work, this could be moved away as a stand-alone library
• the SNMP tools to pull interface lists from monitored devices, as well as read interface data
• the (currently very basic) PHP frontend to query interface graphs

The current developement state is this:

• The HIDS functions are 90% complete and operational (I've been running the toolset for over 3 months in production), with minor known issues; there are several features that still need to be implemented though to improve usability
• The SNMP tools to scan devices and read interface data are working well for our limited infrastructure (Cisco routers and switches, Foundry switches), though some additional features are desirable
• the Web interface is better than nothing, but not much ;)

I would not recommend using HIDSSM for productive use, unless you have another system delivering similar information, nor is it really "end user" or "management" compatible at the moment ... no warranties, explicit or implied, are given ...