Skip to content

Monitoring and logs

Monitoring starts with a question: capacity, reachability, security, or auditability. Enable the smallest collection and retention set that answers that question, then review it regularly.

  • Telegraf, node_exporter, Zabbix 7, and SNMP expose metrics.
  • softflowd exports flow records.
  • ntopng provides traffic analysis and requires an intensive resource profile.
  • Traffic Totals preserves lightweight usage accounting.
  • syslog-ng forwards and stores log streams.
  • LLDP and Neighbor Watch provide local topology signal.

Synchronize time first. Give every log forwarder a reachable destination and test delivery during a planned change. Define retention, access, and incident-review expectations before turning on high-volume inspection or verbose firewall logging.

Watch CPU saturation, memory pressure, disk consumption, interface errors, packet drops, and queue behavior. A monitoring system that reports only “up” can miss the resource exhaustion that makes a firewall unreliable.