Greetings,
I've been using The Dude to monitor a couple of small networks for about a year now, and really love it. I currently manage about 100 larger networks all over the country that all have a Mikrotik at the heart of each network on which I'd like to monitor each respective network remotely with The Dude.

So my question is this: Would you deploy The Dude to each MT, make the MT at each site responsible for collecting the actual data via proxy agent back to a master MT, or use a single master MT to just monitor each network directly and not installing Dude on every site's MT? What are the advantages of either scenario? My visualization would be that the site's MT would do the collecting for its network and report back to a master Dude instance, perhaps on a dedicated x86 instance at a central location for the whole 'single pane' look at the networks. Also, if the site's ISP goes down, I'd like to still be able to collect and monitor data locally until it comes back up.

And then on maps: I'd like to have a 'global' map as I've seen some of you do by importing a country-wide map from GMaps or similar, and pinpointing the geographical location of each site to get a high-level at a glance type overview. Each site would then have a low-level detailed map that would have a full logical network map of monitored devices at that site. So would I create the maps on the site's MT, or at the master Dude monitor and edit the various services to utilize the proxy agent to the respective site Dude instance?

I'm going to keep experimenting, but any feedback or 'best practice approach' tips you might have would be appreciated.

I would put a Dude agent at each site and use that agent to "proxy" Dude probes and statistics gathering for all other devices at that site. This will keep your firewall rules cleaner I think. So only the Dude Master and the Dude Agents will need to communicate with one-another. This is guesswork only - I have a similar "distributed" configuration but all Dude devices are behind the same firewall so I can't confirm that bit about cleaner firewall rules.

The maps and sub-maps that you make will all be on the Master Dude. The Dude agents are just proxies, they do not send copies of their maps up to the Master Dude. (Though I've often thought that this could be a pretty useful feature).

Thanks, that's exactly what I'm looking for. Firewall rules shouldn't be too big a deal either way. I'll have to play with the maps thing, that's the most tedious part of my plan; I kind of want to distribute the maps across each site's ZD, but I don't think it's possible to do the 'single pane' approach that way.