Network Performance & Traffic Monitoring - Who's using what?

[chrisjako]

Just been checking out solarwinds network performance manager and traffic analyser, its exaclty what i'm after but at a £8k educational discounted price tag its a tad on the expensive side.

 

I'm interested to know what tools / software other people are using to monitor traffic, bottlenecks, loops, speed etc. Without using wireshark as i dont have a degree in or time to learn jibberish

[psydii]

Wireshark is a reactive tool... worth getting to know a little bit, at least to be familiar with what 'normal' looks like in terms of packet flow. I am not an expert, but if I fire up wireshark and see a 'high' packet rate or lots of BPDU's(*) I know something is wrong (probably a loop, or a spanning tree problem).

 

HP PCM and IMC are both tools that I have used. Our HelpDesk software can do basic monitoring via SNMP and send alerts, a pain to set up though.

 

ntop might be worth a look.

 

 

(*) When I first saw a wireshark capture with lots of BPDU's I had no idea what they were, only that it didn't look normal.

Edited February 27, 2013 by psydii

[ChrisH]

We use Cacti and Weathermap this gives us graphing of current 5 min averages as well as hourly, daily weekly etc. I then use Weathermap which allows you to draw any kind of digram you like and display link speeds etc, basically anything that you are already graphing in Cacti. The links will change colour according to the scale at the bottom. I have different Weathermaps for other things as well. I have attached two simple examples of ones I use (Some elements on them are not in use/under construction)

I would recommend the following book for learning Wireshark, if you are serious about wanting to know this stuff you need to learn the basics at least:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Practical-Packet-Analysis-Wireshark-Real-World/dp/1593272669/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1361971466&sr=1-1