My ambition was to implement a small (better tiny) appliance for monitoring network health and network resources, short and longtime trends, running under VMware Server or VMware ESX. So I had an eye upon all components which are implemented on the system, to be as leightweight as possible. This was also the reason why no SQL DBMS based software was used.
The appliance is based on Ubuntu Jeos LTS (8.04.3 at the time of this writing). Almost all used components are from the related repositories. This tutorial shows how the appliance was implemented. I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

Used components:

  • Ubuntu 8.04.3 JeOS as OS
  • Nagios 2.11 for monitoring and alarming
  • Smokeping 2.3 to observe latencies and paketloss
  • MRTG 2.14.7 to observe networktraffic's tendencies
  • RRDTool 1.2.19 as Round-Robin Database for storing all measurement data
  • Lighttpd 1.4.19 as fast, lightweight webserver frontend
  • weathermap4rrd for illustrating the networkweather
  • ssmtp as extremely lightweight MTA for maildelivery

The link for this article located at HOWTO Forge is no longer available.