Cherry network monitoring

The work for release v0.5.2 is well under way, hopefully I'll be able to release within the next few weeks.

In the meantime, I fixed the live demo site, it was down for a few weeks due to changing countries :-). But it's back now, so if you wish to see Cherry in action on some live servers, feel free to take a peek.

Well, I was out for about two weeks, while moving from Belgium to Germany, but it seems I'm finally getting settled in, and my internet connection is established *woohoo*. While the next release update of Cherry is still a while off, I thought I'd give a heads up on what's coming.

First off, I've been involved in the development of JRobin lately, where I'm reworking the graphics libraries. JRobin is a 100% Java alternative to RRDtool, with about exactly the same specifications. It is almost certain that I'll be switching to JRobin in the future for the Cherry application, making Cherry 100% Java also.

The next release of Cherry won't have any major updates I think, small additions and changes most likely, to make it more useful and efficient in its current state. The two really major changes that might be coming up are the JRobin switch, and possibly switching to a J2E implementation, almost certainly using JBoss as default application server then.

Well, that's all I wanted to let you guys know, a lot of work still needs to be done, but we're working on it ! Check up on this site regularly for updates.

There are two important changes in this release, first is the fact that the connector between webapplication and collector daemon has been re-coded and doesn't suffer from 'reconnect' problems anymore. Second and most important update is the new SNMP stack that's being used. Westhawk SNMP stack is mucht lighter than the previous one, making the entire application about half its original size.

The complete list of changes:

• Changed SNMP libraries to Westhawk
• New daemon-web connector -> fixed connector issue
• Updated 'Monitoring - Overview' page
• Fixed history graph regeneration
• Added experimental upgrade option to the build script

Note that people 'upgrading' from a 0.5 without switching to a clean database, will have to edit several SNMP parameters manually. All mib-2 parameters that do not start with a . (relative OID) should be changed to the full OID of the form .1.3.6.1.2.1.* .

As usual you can find this new release under downloads.

I managed to finish the first tutorial, showing you how to set up basic network traffic monitoring with Cherry.
This is basically what you need to read if you're new to Cherry.

A pretty lengthy read, it'll show you how to start monitoring stuff with the application, and how to create some nice graphs with the data you want to see. You can get started right here.

Here it is, the first decent Cherry release for the Linux OS. Easy to set up, and... working !
Some things needed to be tweaked to make the app working on Linux, but I think I found all glitches. If you encouter strange things, go to the forum and post them overthere, we'll look into it.

The 0.5 version is a whole new install package, that comes with an Ant script. It's much faster and easier to set up than the old Windows equivalent at this time. I've also written a fairly complete step by step guide for the installation.

The guide is Linux based at this moment, but to install Cherry v0.5 on Windows all you have to do is edit the build.properties file and set the correct values. Installing the other applications on Windows should be pretty straightforward too, expect an updated guide soon.

You can locate Stibbons-0.5 under downloads.

Thanks to Werner Ramaekers for helping out with my first Ant steps.

Allthough there is a Linux version available to download, the Linux version of the Ponder Stibbons release is not working. The problem seems to be laying somewhere with the RRDtool threads, we are looking to resolve this issue as soon as possible.

Updated downloads of both Linux AND Windows releases should be available soon, with only minor changes concerning installation (better documentation and preferably a WORKING Linux version).

If anyone manages to get the Linux version working, please notify me (remove [antispam]).

First release of Cherry has arrived. Originally developed as a 'Network Management Portal' for the company Recticel, this first public release is dubbed 'Ponder Stibbons'. Functionality is identical to the developed 'NMP', focusing on network monitoring, not management (the initial development name was badly chosen).

Following functionality is included in the Stibbons release:

• Basic authentication (read/write user)
• Basic (fixed) network topology information system
• Fully configurable through a web interface, once set up, not necessary to edit configuration files
• Automated monitoring of all kinds of numerical SNMP data
• Easy per component configuration based on SNMP retrieved interface list
• Extensive per component configuration, allowing multiple monitorscripts to be run for a same component, but at different intervals
• Simple and efficient re-use of monitoring and graphing scripts by means of templates
• Graph configuration and generation using the full power of RRDtool graphing capabilities
• Efficient storage of data by the use of RRDtool (once a database is written, it never grows in size)
• Simple baselining of data (baseline profiles), useful for trend analysis
• Multi threaded collector daemon for efficient collecting and storing of SNMP data for many components

Cherry is a network monitoring application, fully implemented in Java. The application uses a website as user interface, and a multi-threaded server for datacollection and -storage. It uses RRDtool as a statistical database backend, and Java SNMP libraries for datacollection with SNMP. A relational DBMS is necessary for all configuration and static data, the Stibbons release comes with scripts and configuration for MySQL.

This is basically an exact copy of the NMP app developed for the company Recticel. This release won't even end up in the CVS, unless people request it. I'm thinking of a moderately serious redesign of the whole application for the next (and first serious) release, too much will change, so it'll be easier if not many people go adding stuff to this release... i'm just lazy :-) You'll probably find lots of references to Recticel all over the place, just ignore them. Also the code is totally NOT or VERY BADLY documented... my mistake :(

Ofcourse, you're still most welcome to edit anything you want, anything useful, do drop me a line (remove the [dontspam] part though). If you develop an interesting monitoring script and graph batch, feel free to spread it with the world, that's what this app was made for :) This release is pretty messy, and docs and source might be only available in like one or two days, but don't worry, they will be :-)

What you need for Cherry:
--> JSP/Servlet enabled webserver (preferably Tomcat 4.* with JDK 1.4* for XML/XSL support)
--> MySQL database server
--> System where you can run the data collector (executable) and store all RRDtool databases
--> Depending on your configuration and the number of components you wish to monitor, a lot of diskspace ;)