Another post in the records for the tech blog, this time all about opensource network monitoring with LibreNMS!
Isnt nagios and a dozen others also GPL?
Nagios is a premium offering. They have some open source components, but the software model is absolutely not built around the spirit of GPL.
Zabbix is the obvious alternative in my mind, and it is AGPLv3, so absolutely in the same spirit as the LibreNMS license. It’s a slightly different tool though, and less network-specific. Having used both, I prefer LibreNMS for specifically network monitoring, it’s laid out to cater more to an ISP-type entity running it, and I like that. Zabbix still gets my wholehearted stamp of approval though.
I only have one issue with the post.
The conclusion says use long random SNMP community strings.
Ideally you should be using SNMPv3 because snmp1/2/2c are all clear text.
Apart from that, nice article
You are absolutely correct, thank you. Sadly a bunch of devices still don’t support it, even in 2025 (like my microtik switch) for example. I will absolutely add a note about that though, thank you!
Updated the post to reflect your feedback here. Thank you!
@StarkZarn@infosec.pub have you heard of NixOS? If you’d become a contributor with these bitesized posts that you’re doing you’d be increasing the repeatability of your work immensely.
No pressure. Just doing some evangelization 🙂
I absolutely have and used it for a while before landing on opensuse microos primarily. I absolutely see the benefit and enjoyed the git-centric nature, keeping flakes in repos with a flavor for each machine. What I didn’t enjoy, however, was the seemingly poor documentation. Quite frankly too, the drama surrounding the community doesn’t inspire confidence either. I decided I ought to try out guix but haven’t gotten to it yet. I do actually still have one nixos VM that hosts some services for me and is built entirely on the concept of the impermanence flake. That was pretty cool.
Works in a enterprise setting as well
My college system is working on implementing it as our network monitoring utility, so far so good
Absolutely! I’d happily take any comments you have from running it in an enterprise setting, if you care to share.
Thanks! Adding to my list to check out. Grabbed the RSS feed for your blog as well!
Excellent! Let me know if there are specific things you’d like to hear about.
