Distributed & Redundant Network Service Discovery, Monitoring & Penetration Testing
The times are changing; infrastructure today is large & globally distributed. Systems administrators/enginners and others who work in "devops" need a better solutions that what is currently available as of January 2012.
2012q2 Update: Custos Public Service, at custos.io is now open for beta users.
2012q1 Update: Custos is getting an overhaul, dropping it's dependence on Nagios/Icinga and moving into it's own. The current solutions don't scale well; in most scenarios there is some single-point-of-failure ("SPOF"). Additionally the monitoring systems do not scale well - adding parallel systems for high-availability or load-balancing is a complex task.
Custos aims to change that, creating a system that is an easy to deploy, distributed & redundant system.
Custos v2012.10 (r2130)
The information below is about the last version of Custos which was based around Nagios/Icinga.
Custos is a web-based network service & infrastructure monitoring and discovery application. Built on a Linux platform and deployed as VM images Custos creates a distributed, redundant network monitoring system.
Custos is a replacement for Icinga, Nagios (or Zabbix &c). Custos builds on top of the lessons from those applications while adding in increased durability and simpler deployments.
- PHP WebUI with Machine and Service Editing Ability
- IP Address Management
- OpenVAS integration for Security Scans
- rrdtool based availability and performance graphing (influenced by PNP4Nagios)
- Full IPv6 Support
Like many other Monitorng tools Custos can run machine/service checks via ICMP, TCP, SNMP, ssh and many other methods. Additionally Custos offers some IPAM
- Application Monitoring via custom check scripts
- Service and Machine (host, appliance, &c) Monitoring via standard check scripts
- Basic IPAM Functionality
- SNMP Integration
Custos is built around three GPL software packages: Nagios, PNP4Nagios and OpenVAS
Nagios is used to perform Machine and Service checks, PNP4Nagios assists with graph creation. OpenVAS performs Machine and Service security audits. Custos ties all these nice packages together.
Custos Included Tools
- nmap
- OpenVAS - Vulnerability Assessment
- Greenbone - Security Assistant
- Arachni
- DIRB
- Nikto
- w3af - Web Application Attack and Audit Framework
- wapiti
Deprecated Tools
- Nagios - An excellent tool, a core component of Custos
- PNP4Nagios - Graphing
See Also
- Comparison of Network Monitoring Software
- Nagios Graph Performance
- Stanford list of Network Monitoring Tools
Other Network Monitoring Solutions
These tools below, directly compete with Custos; which may not be the right solution.


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