I'd like to announce the release of a new network analysis tool,
the SNMP Vulture (http://www.vix.com/vulture). Vulture is a set of
utilities to collect and store SNMP data and browse it in an
interactive fashion (using any web browser). The result is a tool
that can give you a good grasp of what a large network is doing.
Here's a bit of the main man page:
VULTURE(1) VULTURE VULTURE(1)
NAME
vulture - collect a round of snmp based on configuration
files
SYNOPSIS
vulture [-dhv]
DESCRIPTION
Vulture collects SNMP data and stores it in a hierarchy of
log files. It determines what data to collect based on a
configuration file that in turn relies on a series of SNMP
template files to determine which objects need to be col-
lected for each entry in the configuration file.
When invoked, vulture will collect a single set of data
and store it in the log files. This is not very useful,
and vulture is almost never invoked this way. This is usu-
ally only necessary while debugging changes to configura-
tion or template files.
Vulture collects its data in a two pass operation where it
first sizes up the tables involved, and then requests
entire tables of relevant information. This is an effi-
cient process, since it knows which objects it needs out
of given tables, based on the information in it's template
files.
All data that can be directly matched against the net-
work.desc file are placed into the regular log files. Data
for interfaces that are not listed in the network.desc
file are placed in a parallel set of discard log files.
These data are usually discarded much earlier than regular
data.