LibreNMS at the Tier 1

Kashif Hafeez
STFC RAL
GridPP43 – August 2019
 Contents
• Why LibreNMS.
• What is LibreNMS.
• Installing LibreNMS.
• Adding devices.
• Our Setup.
• Maps.
• VMware integration.
• Future use.
Librenms vs observium
 What is LibreNMS
• SNMP-based auto-discovering network monitoring
system.
• Written in PHP as a web application.
• Use MySQL/MariaDB and RRD backend.
• Community-based fork of the last GPL-licensed version of
Observium.
• Includes support for a wide range of hardware.
• Over 100 vendors supported.
• Routers, Switches, Access Points, Security gateways.
Hosts, Printers, … range of server/network devices
 Vendors
3Com Brocade Engenius Lantronix NRG Siklu
ADTRAN Brother Enterasys Lenovo OKI Sentry3
Acceidan Buffalo Epson Lexmark OpenBSD Solaris
Aerohive Calix Extreme Liebert Oracle SonicWALL
AKCP Cambium F5 Networks LigoWave PacketShaper SpeedTouch
Alcatel-Lucent Canon Fastback Linux Palo Supermicro
Allied Canopy Fiberstore Maipu Papouch Symbol
APC Telesis Check FiberHome Mellanox PBN Telco
Apple Cisco Point Force10 Meraki Perle TPLink
Areca Cisco Fortinet MGE Powercode Tranzeo
Arista Citrix FreeBSD Microsemi Powerwalker Tripp
Aruba Cometsystem Gamatronic Mikrotik Prestige Ubiquiti
Audiocodes Comware Hikvision MRVLD Proxim Viprinet
Avaya D-Link HP Multimatic Proxmox VMware
Avocent Datacom Huawei NetApp Quanta VRP
AVTECH Deliberant HW NetBSD Radlan Vyatta
Axis Dell IBM NETGEAR Raritan VyOS
Barracuda Delta Infoblox NetMan Redback Watchguard
BCM963 DEVELOP iPoMan Netonix Ricoh WebPower
BDCom DKT ITWatchDogs Netopia Riverbed Windows
Bintec Eaton Comega Juniper NetVision Ruckus Xerox
Bluecat EDS Konica NetWare SAF Xirrus
BNT EMC Kyocera Nokia Samsung ZTE
 Features
• Auto discovery
• Alerting
• Multiple environment sensors support
• VLAN, ARP and FDB table collection
• Customizable Dashboards
• Distributed Polling
• NetFlow, sFlow, IPFIX (NfSen)
• Service monitoring (Nagios Plugins)
• Syslog (Integrated, Graylog)
• Traffic Billing (Quota, 95th Percentile)
• Two Factor Authentication
• Multiple Authentication Methods (MySQL, LDAP, Active Directory, HTTP)
• API
• Device Backup integration (Oxidized, RANCID)
• Auto Updating
• Multiple protocols data collection (STP, OSPF, BGP etc)
 Installing LibreNMS
• Docker image
• Virtual machine images
• Manually (Ubuntu, RHEL/Centos)

• Migrating from Observium. (scripts available in installation

folder)
For further information please visit:
https://docs.librenms.org/Installation/
 Adding Device
• CLI
./addhost.php yourhostname [community] [v1|v2c] [port] [udp|udp6|tcp|tcp6]
Example:
/opt/librenms/addhost.php scarray-vmware2 community v2c STFC

• WebUI
• Ping Only Device
• Auto-discovery
• API

Hostname can be resolved using DNS or local /etc/hosts file.

 Our Setup
• Two systems (VMs) for production and development use.
• Configured with dual network interfaces. Data and
management.
• Install via Aquilon.
• Taking regular snapshots of the VMs and backup config files
and rrd data.
• 292 Devices added so far.
• Include servers, switches, PDUs, storage arrays etc.
• Divided in different device groups.
• IPv6 interface (not configured yet)
 Maps
Network Availability

Weathermap
Vmware hypervisor and shared storage
Vmware VMs monitoring
 Future use
• Capacity planning (Distributed-Poller)
 LibreNMS has the ability to distribute polling of devices to other machines. These machines can be in a
different physical location and therefore minimize network latency for devices that are a considerable
distance away or are behind NAT firewalls.

• Oxidized integration
 A system for automatically extracting, storing, and comparing configuration files from network devices.

• SmokePING
 Its a tool which lets us keep track of network latency, and visualise this through RRD graphs.

• Network-Weathermap with LibreNMS

 Allow you to build network maps to help visualize network traffic flow rates.