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librenms/librenms

★ 4,709PHPAudience · ops devopsComplexity · 4/5LicenseSetup · hard

TLDR

A free, community-maintained network monitoring system that watches routers, switches, and servers across your network, auto-discovers devices, and alerts you when something goes wrong.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((librenms))
    What it does
      Network monitoring
      Device auto-discovery
      Performance graphing
      Alerting
    Supported hardware
      Cisco and Juniper
      HP and Foundry
      Linux and FreeBSD
    Tech foundation
      SNMP protocol
      PHP backend
      MySQL database
    Getting started
      VM image available
      VirtualBox supported
      Full docs online
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Code map

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Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Monitor all routers, switches, and servers on a company network from a single web dashboard.

USE CASE 2

Automatically discover every device on a network without manually registering each one.

USE CASE 3

Get email or Slack alerts when a network device goes down or performance drops.

USE CASE 4

Track historical bandwidth, CPU, and memory usage for Cisco, Juniper, and HP hardware.

Tech stack

PHPMySQLSNMPPythonJavaScriptRRDtool

Getting it running

Difficulty · hard Time to first run · 1h+

Requires a dedicated server with PHP, MySQL, and SNMP, all monitored devices must have SNMP enabled.

Free to use, modify, and distribute under the GPL v3, but any modified version you distribute must also be released as open source under the same license.

In plain English

LibreNMS is a free, community-maintained system for monitoring computer networks. It watches over routers, switches, servers, and other networked devices, collecting data about their health and performance so that administrators can spot problems early. It uses a protocol called SNMP (a standard way for network equipment to report its own status) along with PHP and MySQL as its technical foundation. One of its notable features is auto-discovery: when you point LibreNMS at your network, it can find and identify devices on its own rather than requiring you to manually register each one. It supports a wide range of hardware from manufacturers like Cisco, Juniper, Brocade, HP, and Foundry, as well as servers running Linux, FreeBSD, and other operating systems. The project is community-driven and governed by values borrowed from the Debian Social Contract, which prioritizes the needs of users and open participation. Anyone can contribute by improving documentation, reporting bugs on the community forums, or submitting code changes via GitHub. There is also a Discord server and community forum for discussion and support. For those who want to try LibreNMS without a full installation, a pre-built virtual machine image based on Ubuntu is available for download and can be run in VirtualBox, a free virtualization tool. Full installation documentation is available at docs.librenms.org. LibreNMS is open source software released under version 3 of the GNU General Public License, meaning it is free to use, modify, and distribute. It has been in active development since at least 2006 and is sustained through community contributions and optional financial backing via Open Collective.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
How do I set up LibreNMS to auto-discover all devices on my 192.168.1.0/24 network?
Prompt 2
Show me how to configure SNMP v2c on a Cisco switch so LibreNMS can monitor it.
Prompt 3
How do I create an alert rule in LibreNMS that sends an email when a device goes offline?
Prompt 4
What are the minimum server requirements to run LibreNMS and monitor 50 network devices?
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