Build pmacct on Mac OSX from source

I need a way to generate real-world NetFlow data, and pmacct is a great tool that helped me with various things. I couldn’t find a precompiled package so I have compiled it from the source myself. To get it running on my MacBook Pro with Apple Silicon, I had to jump through a few hoops to get it running. Here is a quick guide to making it work for someone else, including my future self :) Continue reading

APT Monitoring with Prometheus

As soon you run a Linux server, you need to make sure your systems are up-to-date. It would also be handy to know if you had Kernel upgrades which require a reboot of the system to get applied. I came across a blog post from Tom Henderson which provided a solution using the Node_Exporter with Prometheus. The way he solved this is pretty slick. I had to tweak the scripts a bit to get it running. Continue reading

BGP monitoring playground

Monitoring BGP can be done in various ways. First thing people want to know is if there is a way to get notifications in case a BGP peering session goes down. A pretty common way monitoring the BGP peering session state is using SNMP and the RFC1269 MIB. In OpenNMS Horizon we have the BGP session monitor which allows to track the state using the BGP peer table. The downside is, you need to configure for every peering session a monitor and this can be cumbersome and hard to maintain. Continue reading