raven

README

Raven

Home Network Monitoring

Introduction

Home networks are getting a lot of devices on them, what is better known as IoT. There is monitoring software out there to give you a view of what is and isn't working on a network. The issue is all this monitoring is geared around an Enterprise.

I've worked with deploying Network Monitoring Systems (NMS) for over 20 years. A lot of the enterpise feature are honestly not needed for a home network. They systems are boated with:

• Notififcation systems
• Multi-level access controls
• Network isolation detection
• Service Level Agreement(SLA), enforcement and documenation
• Performace Archiving/History Database
• Intergration to Ticketing systems

What I want, is just a webpage I can go to and see if the reason my Xbox can't get on the net is because my router crashed or the switch it's plugged into is offline.

Goals

• Simple config, .ini files
• Lightweight process, Raspberry Pi Model 2B+ is the target platform
  • Note I have it monitoring 18 hosts with 42 tests running fine on a Pi Zero-W. <5% CPU and <3% Memory
• Little Disk I/O, Raspberry Pi uses a flash card

History

This is a rewrite of my prototype Kassandra, which was written in Python. When I showed it to MarkLlama, he suggest GoLang, and a name change, since Cassandra is Distrubuted Database from Apache. So thinking about it and liking to name things after mythological stuff, I decided on Raven. Odin has a pair of Ravens which worked as agents for him.

So the last week or so I've been working on getitng the parts working in Go. The structure is still basically the same.

Changes

• The ini file now does not use type specifiers for the sections. They are implied by the type of data in it.
  • Checks MUST have a checkwith key
  • Hosts MUST have a hostname or ipv4 key
• Hosts are now associated with Checks
• Hosts are not able to modify a check
  • if you want two checks that do almost the same thing, it's two checks.
  • this was done to emulate how Nagios does things. But after turning up a bunch of nagios checks in Kassandra, I decided it was cleaner this way.

To Do

• Documentation
  • Shocker needs documenations
• Configuration
  • Add IPv6
  • Better error checking in the configuation file
  • Allow "Groups" to be monitored
  • Allow a host to be part of multiple groups?
• Check Commands
  • Implement SNMP checks
    • these can be done though nagios commands.
• Logging
  • reduce the chattiness of the server
    • I think it's about right now.
• WebServer
  • Make column sortable (DataTables.js?)
  • add tabs for the "Groups"?
    • this exists but I want to fix the javascript so it's sticky.
• Packaging
  • Get help with or figure out Debian/Raspbian packaging
  • make an RPM/Spec file