Pawikan Network Monitor

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Why it was named Pawikan?
   It's very difficult to choose a logo for a certain softwatre product and nowadays, most open-source software uses animals as their logos. So we decided to name it in such a way that is Filipino-related so we named it "Pawikan" which is a Filipino term for "turtle" in the Philippines. Pawikan is one of the endangered and well-prototected turtle species in one of the 7,101 islands of the Philippines. We never thought of the name Pawikan as one of the possible names until the time when one of our developers saw a picture of mating Pawikans on the net. Since Pawikan is not yet being used by other software products, we immediately decided to name it as "Pawikan". As a network management software, Pawikan means integration or mating of most commonly used open-source tools such as Cricket, RRD, Postgresql, Apache, PHP, Java and Perl inorder to make way for a powerful and efficient network management system. This combination of available open-source tools -- together with new features such as network discovery, automatic collector configuration, topology mapping, and many other features -- makes Pawikan as a good scalable network management solution for small, medium and large-scale networks.


2. Can I monitor non-router devices using other plugins? What are the available plugins of Pawikan?
   Right now, non-SNMP devices cannot be monitored by Pawikan. However, users can develop and contribute their own plugins. Click here for the list of plugins available in Pawikan.


3. How do I write a plugin?
   Click here to write your own plugins.


4. What's the difference between Pawikan and Cricket?
   Cricket is an SNMP collector that uses RRD Tool to store and graph data. Pawikan uses Cricket's collector function. What Pawikan did is that it added network discovery so that Cricket would know which devices to monitor. And using an RRD to SQL converter, the Cricket data is being stored by Pawikan into an SQL format which is stored for a long period and can be easily manipulated to do more flexible functions. Unlike Cricket, Pawikan has an integreated network weathermap system and network discovery visualization system which are automatically generated using Java.


5. Who uses Pawikan?
   Right now, Pawikan is being used the Philippine Research Education and Government Information Network(PREGINET). The running server can be seen here.


6. What are the obvious advantages of Pawikan compared to other Network Monitoring tools available?
   Currently available Network Monitoring tools only provides the backend or front-end of the software. With Pawikan, the software has a veru noce back-end that was fast and developed using Object Oriented Programming and the Java GUIs are very promising. In the future, Pawikan will be featuring real-time Java-based GUIs so we can easily manage a complex network. One example nice feature of Pawikan is its network discovery and automatic collector configuration. Another one is its capability to store the granular network utilization.


7. Is Pawikan free?
   YES! However, our dual license prohibits its use to commercial applications without written agreement with our company.


8. How does Pawikan works?
   Please take a look at these diagram.