ElastiFlow VS Zabbix

As a matter of fact, I played with the now deprecated Elastiflow, however I couldn't get my head around managing ELK, scrapped it pretty quickly, and Netflow did not reach the meaningful stage at that time. OpenNMS looks pretty massive that I can't run it at the moment. Thanks for suggestion though.

One thing I ran for a while was security onion and utilized port mirroring to mirror the uplink port from my primary switch to my LAN on my router, so I was catching anything coming into/out of my network destined for internet. I've also used ElastiFlow ( https://github.com/robcowart/elastiflow ) which is absolutely phenomenal and awesome, I did the same and it provides some great data. You could also leverage IntelOwl ( https://github.com/intelowlproject/IntelOwl ) , one thing I have added to all my VMs is a OSSEC agent, Wazuh to be specific which is free ( https://github.com/wazuh/wazuh ) and while I am not using it to its full potential such as monitoring file deletions/modifications etc it is a powerful tool.

I'd recommend taking a look at Elastiflow (link is to the legacy version, I haven't used the pay structured tier version that replaced it) as a flow collector. Do it in a docker container, dump netflow to it, and use a sample rate that doesn't fill your collector box with flow packets after a single day. Depends on your traffic rates. We use 1 out of 250 for our rate.

https://github.com/robcowart/elastiflow/issues/201 https://github.com/robcowart/elastiflow/issues/52

Where as the newer version is (https://github.com/robcowart/elastiflow/) is called:

Zabbix

Zabbix is a comprehensive open-source monitoring solution designed for real-time monitoring and management of various network components, such as servers, networks, and applications. It excels in data collection and processing, enabling proactive monitoring for early issue detection and resolution.

The PHP core package is offered as pre-compiled binary via Ports packages system. In addition, important softwares such as extensions, Composer and PECL libraries are available. So are frameworks such as NextCloud and Zabbix.

Prometheus is a great way to go, however you need to invest time in writing all the alerts. This was a daunting task for us, because we have too many vendors and device types.. we instead went with zabbix, which is a free open source platform similar to Orion. Quite easy to setup. All the device templates for monitoring alerting are provided by the community. There is a grafana plugin which integrates with Zabbix, so you can build beautiful dashboards in grafana while using the polling and alerting logic in zabbix. You can also use grafana OnCall via a zabbix integration. Phase1: You could move to zabbix. Realize cost savings without investing time. Phase2: learn and work on moving things to Prometheus slowly. edit: added links and some rewording

Setup Zabbix (https://www.zabbix.com/) and use SNMP (search for a template for your switches, chances are someone has created one) to pull throughput data from the switchport your proxies are connected to. This will graph them for you on a continual basis, you can then setup some triggers (alerts) that will flag over-utilization (say >80Mbps) for you, can generate an email or SMS alert based on that or just see it in the dashboard.

Look at setting up Zabbix (https://www.zabbix.com/) you can then do ping and latency tests to key hosts/endpoints and get packet loss and other variables in a graphical format. Also will allow you to setup monitoring to alert when there are known issues.

Check out Zabbix. Similar to something like PRTG (I see was already mentioned) but it is a free solution. Only cost is setup time and infrastructure.

now if its more metric data you are using and want to do APM, prometheus is your man https://prometheus.io/, want to make prometheus your full time job? deploy cortex https://cortexmetrics.io/, honorable mention in the metrics space, Zabbix, https://www.zabbix.com/ I've seen use cases of zabbix going way beyond its intended use its a fantastic tool

- NMS / NPM: NetXMS, Zabbix, LibreNMS, PRTG - NCM, updates, automation: Unimus - IaC / automation: Ansible - DCIM / IPAM: NetBox - IPAM / DDI: Infoblox