Network monitoring tools for TV in office

[maxrebo]

Hi,

We have a TV in our office we would like to monitor the network, can anyone recommend anything (preferably free) that we can stick on there?

 

I know there's paid for options such as PRTG and Impero, but we don't have the budget for that.

 

Thanks

[RLR]

Hi,

We have a TV in our office we would like to monitor the network, can anyone recommend anything (preferably free) that we can stick on there?

 

I know there's paid for options such as PRTG and Impero, but we don't have the budget for that.

 

Thanks

 

This was posted not so long ago. Setup zabbix with grafana.

Free Network Monitoring

[nwkeene]

We use mutiny here and under the educational licencing its £1 per node monitored per annum. Pays for itself over and over with advanced warning of disc failures etc.

Have a look at this post here on Edugeek. There are lots of options, all with varying amounts of work to get them cooking well...

 

edit: beaten to it with the link...

edit 2: the link is to another post about network monitoring...!

 

time for tea...

Edited March 16, 2023 by nwkeene

[Miscbrah]

PRTG gives you 100 nodes free. Might be worth a look if you can keep it under that.

[DalekSec]

+1 for Zabbix

[mbedford]

Personally I shy away from this kind of 'dashboard' approach. I have visited numerous IT support teams over the years and the one's that have TV's all over the office showing dashboard full of graphs and traffic lights or alerts tend to fall into the following trap.

 

"Treating the number, not the problem"

 

By that I mean, the dashboard might look like everything is great, but out in the real world the staff and other users\customers are having all sorts of bad experiences. Yes monitor the infrastructure, keep an eye on disk space, email queues, print queues etc, but remember the end user experience is the most important metric. If your customers are not able to use the system you are supporting, no amount of 99.999% uptime graphs are going to help them.

 

In my environment, we have an email go out to our second\third line team every 20 mins, in the background, a process has remotely checked every server for important stats (disk space, CPU use, ping, and other application specific metrics for exchange, SQL etc), if this email shows an issue, we investigate, bu the email is very much a secondary thing. Not something I focus on and I definitely don't wait for the email to tell me there is a problem before I actually start believing the customer.

 

TLDR

Monitoring is great, but having it front and centre of your operation is IMO going to paper over some cracks which actually impact the customer more.

[TechMonkey]

I can't talk about all IT departments but where I have had a dashboard we have used it to give us a heads up of major things or a heads up something was iffy. There were numerous occasions a teacher came into the office to report something odd and we were all ready on it and investigating or on a couple of occasions had already fixed it. Treating the number, not the problem is a departmental/management issue, whether you have a monitoring system or not. Having a monitoring system isn't about believing a user or confirming, it is about being proactive and having access to information in a timely manner.

 

It does depend on how the dashboard is setup and used though. Monitor all the things is fantastic, but you end up with a lot of background noise, that can end up it being ignored. Having the 100 sensor free version of PRTG does concentrate the mind wonderfully. You can tie a monitoring system into some helpdesks, we have FreshService tied into PRTG so any issues generate a ticket. But we have usually seen the issue as it is front and center in the office.

 

Another benefit is that when staff come in they see the screen and are interested, it generates conversation so staff can see what we are actually doing, and if a graph is showing orange (unusual) they ask what it means, and it shows to them we are looking at things before they break. It is also a good visual of how much we do, servers, switches, firewalls, copiers, etc, etc.

 

But you are right, if you only run the network based on a monitoring system you are going to hit customer satisfaction issues, it should be a single facet of a multi-threaded approach, another tool in your arsenal.

[Davit2005]

PRTG can be very proactive along with other monitoring tools. It can alert on drive space issues, services down i.e. not jus pinging and be highly effective of alerting of a possible issue before your users start to notice.

 

You need to of course have a solution that does not cause too much alerts to the extent something important gets missed.

[Deanuk]

I did this little guide here. It's still relevant and in date: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/network-classroom-management/224387-free-network-monitoring.html

 

EDIT: All free too.

[jthompson]

Our monitoring system is one of my permatabs and it affords me a massive amount of peripheral awareness about the systems, but I'd struggle to make one single screen on the office wall all that useful now, tbh. The value for me is in being able to interact with it to drill down as needed (was the power out anywhere last night? when was the Net2 service last not running?) rather than a declarative dashboard viewed across the room.