Intranet network monitoring question

[jmair]

I need a way of monitoring bandwidth use on my network. we are small enough to have one MDF and two IDF rooms on one subnet. We are one network and really one school under the same roof. But I need a way to track bandwidth and speed internally. I'm just not sure what software I should be looking at to get this kind of info over a week or months time. Any suggestions?

 

*Our network was build about 12 years ago and we are planning on upgrading our security cameras that will add a considerable amount of traffic and we need to make sure our current network can support the additional traffic.

[TechMonkey]

If you are adding security cameras I'm presuming you have VLANs to segregate them off? Cameras can be very chatty so a VLAN will stop them annoying everyone else.

 

As for your software, a network monitoring suite will do this. So for free you could try NAGIOS, or Cacti, semi free there is PRTG (up to 100 sensors). Yuu query your switches or router with SNMP and get all teh data you could possibly want, speeds, throughput, errors, etc.

[Norphy]

Any half decent monitoring platform should do it.

 

There are three reasonably simple free options which run on Linux:

 

Zabbix

LibreNMS

Observium

 

then there's Nagios, which I would only recommend if you're some kind of sadist.

 

On the Windows side, you could try PRTG, but that's not free.

[jthompson]

I'll add my obligatory suggestion of checkmk. Runs on Linux and is well documented.

[RLR]

Here's a thread from a little while back about using Zabbix to monitor different systems.

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/network-classroom-management/224387-free-network-monitoring.html#post1921954

 

I'm currently setting this up at the moment. Taking a bit of time to learn and get use to.

[jmair]

Thanks for the support guys. You all rock!

[mavhc]

Zabbix 6 rc1 just came out, so almost time to try that if you haven't.

 

Need a grid of which ones do what

[mavhc]

https://sre.google/sre-book/monitoring-distributed-systems/

https://www.brendangregg.com/usemethod.html

https://grafana.com/blog/2018/08/02/the-red-method-how-to-instrument-your-services/

 

Librenms seems a bit complex: https://github.com/librenms/docker/blob/master/examples/compose/docker-compose.yml

Observium: https://github.com/somsakc/docker-observium/blob/master/amd64/docker-compose.yml

[Oaktech]

https://sre.google/sre-book/monitoring-distributed-systems/

https://www.brendangregg.com/usemethod.html

https://grafana.com/blog/2018/08/02/the-red-method-how-to-instrument-your-services/

 

Librenms seems a bit complex: https://github.com/librenms/docker/blob/master/examples/compose/docker-compose.yml

Observium: https://github.com/somsakc/docker-observium/blob/master/amd64/docker-compose.yml

 

Observium seems almost too good to be true... Going to give it a try.

[Norphy]

Observium really is very good. It's a bit weak for Windows because it only does SNMP and Windows SNMP is terrible but for network devices and Linux, it's excellent.

 

The only onion in the ointment with it is that the person who owns the product is a complete pillock.

[mavhc]

Observium does WMI too, of course MS is also getting rid of that

[pete]

Observium is very good, especially in recent versions after they relaxed the need for dns names for devices.

 

Setup and autodiscovery is fast too, provided you've already got SNMP configured on devices.

 

However, if you're starting from scratch, I'd go LibreNMS (it's a fork of Observium) as it has features (device config backup integration, graylog export, 2FA) missing in Observium Community Edition. There's an Ubuntu 20.04 OVA that you can spin up and test with in their downloads: https://github.com/librenms/packer-builds/releases/tag/21.2.0