Ping test monitoring
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On my juniper virewalls, I have a function called Monitor which basically pings what ever remote IP's I want and get a report when one or more of those remotes become unavailable
I need to gather some statistics to find a problem so need the same function. Is there some way or addon to pfsense which allows me to run such a test, along with keep a report?
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I just signed up for pingdom.com Sounds like I could have saved the annual fee if this feature was built into pfSense. Perhaps a bounty is in order?
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I just signed up for pingdom.com Sounds like I could have saved the annual fee if this feature was built into pfSense. Perhaps a bounty is in order?
I would suggest making this a base part of any firewall.
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I'm not sure it should be built in (especially with reporting…) but an add-on package maybe. Monitoring IPs (that aren't gateways...) is a job for an NMS, not a firewall.
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I'm not sure it should be built in (especially with reporting…) but an add-on package maybe. Monitoring IPs (that aren't gateways...) is a job for an NMS, not a firewall.
You guys can argue that if you want but the bottom line is that a good firewall always has some basic tools built in to help find problems. On my juniper, I can set as many remote locations to ping for example so can get a perfect picture of what's going on. Are the connections stopping outside of my providers network or inside. Are only certain parts of the Internet going missing, are only certain networks.
I can set pings and thresholds to multiple addresses and get a report every time a ping fails, thus giving me a picture of what's going on.Now, if someone knows of a better or alternative tool, I'd love to know about it because this has been quite useful to me.
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The easy hack for that is to just add any IP you want to monitor as a gateway. (Add a dummy IP in a local subnet for the actual gateway IP, and set the monitor IP to whatever remote system you want) and then the gateway view on the dashboard or Status > Gateways will show the status, it'll keep an RRD quality graph, etc. Not really pretty in terms of what it's meant to do, but it would accomplish what you're after.
Firewalls may provide diagnostic information, sure; manual pings, traceroute, etc, but automatically tracking the status of remote systems is the very definition of what an NMS is meant to do. If it were a package I am sure many people would love it (I'd probably use it too) but it doesn't really belong in the base system.
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Now, if someone knows of a better or alternative tool, I'd love to know about it because this has been quite useful to me.
I would say: Zabbix, Nagios or Zenoss (in no particular order ofc :D)
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I hear good things about Pandora FMS but haven't tried it myself.
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A related question would be are there any real time monitoring tools for pfsense? I don't need them on the box itself but perhaps via syslog for example. I'd love to see what's going on in real time, at all times, along with getting some reports, history, etc.
I have three pfsense firewalls which I'd love to monitor/maintain centrally though some sort of monitoring package.
I know snort is an addon but I'm not sure I have the capacity to take on anything overly complex at the moment, my head is reeling from over technology.
