Statseeker

The Networking Field Day 4 delegates and myself met with Stewart Reed of Statseeker on the sixth floor sixth floor of Casino M8trix in San Jose, CA on Wednesday afternoon October 10, 2012.

While I have no personal experience with Statseeker although I have a lot of experience running large scale implementations of MRTG and RRD on both physical hardware and virtual guests.

I’m going to outline the different presentations that we heard and perhaps make a few points here and there if I have anything useful to say. I’ll include a short blurb from Statseeker in italics to help define/describe each product or solution. Thankfully since the sessions were recorded you can watch for yourself and make your own informed opinion.

Here’s my disclaimer; I’m not endorsing any of the solutions presented below. I’m merely passing on the information along with a few comments of my own. If you have any personal opinions about the solutions below why not share them with us in the comments?

Statseeker

Tech Field Day Video Part 1 | Part 2
by Stewart Reed

Statseeker is highly scalable, industrial strength, network monitoring software that delivers 100% visibility of every interface, on every device, on any sized network, every 60 seconds. Statseeker scales up to 500,000 interfaces per server, installs as an appliance, is configured in minutes, reports in any time zone and never rolls up the data. Monitoring of Network Interfaces and Devices, NetFlow, sFlow, LAN Traffic, Traps, NBAR, Syslog, IP SLA, Disk, Memory, Temperature, CPU, Servers, Printers, UPS and more… Statseeker was the tool of choice to collect data on the performance of more than 154,000 interfaces, across more than 3,000 sites, from a single server.

Networking Field Day 4 Demo

My Thoughts?

Statseeker is a performance monitoring solution in competition with MRTG/RRD, What’s Up Gold, Solarwinds, Nagios, Cacti, etc. Statseeker differentiates itself in four ways, 1) it polls every interface in the network, 2) it polls every interface every 60 seconds, 3) it doesn’t roll-up or average any of the previously captured data points, 4) scalability – it can poll an incredible number of interfaces on a single low end server or desktop hardware.

I’ve been working with MRTG and RRD for years now and it’s always a challenge managing and tuning any sizable installation. And while I’m a former system administrator not everyone on the team is as skilled or knowledgeable when it comes to Linux administration or MRTG/RRD in general. While it’s nice to have open source solutions sometimes a commercial offering that just gets the job done without any daily care or feeding is just what the doctor ordered.

In the case of Statseeker it does performance monitoring really well and at scale which can be challenging.

How much disk space does Statseeker need? It requires 1GB yearly for every 1,000 interfaces you plan on monitoring.

I’m impressed with the scalability of Statseeker. While Statseeker primarily focuses on performance monitoring they also handle device availability (and alerting), SNMP traps, syslog, NetFlow and sFlow (no IPFIX I guess).

If you’d like to hear more Statseeker recently recorded a sponsored podcast with the Greg and Ethan over at the Packet Pushers Podcast.

And there’s this cute marketing video that Statseeker released on YouTube;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6o_ts5ztPGE&feature=player_embedded&noredirect=1

Cheers!