Network Monitoring Software

[mcnallyfc]

Morning

 

After some advice - started new role at secondary school in Sept and after a few months now im wanting to introduce some sort of network monitoring software.

 

At the moment we dont really have anything that can give me some network performance stats (to see any switches under load not enough bandwidth etc) or if a switch goes down to alert us.

 

So am wondering whats available that i could look at purchasing if need be (ideally free but willing to pay) that is simple to use that i could have running on the servers and monitoring network traffic?

 

I currently use spiceworks for the helpdesk aspect, i know it can do some aspects of network monitoring but was looking for something specifically created for that purpose.

 

Thanks

[glennda]

You could look at nagios

[sparkeh]

It's free (but there seems to be some (paid) subscription elements.

 

Spiceworks would strongly disagree with you there.

 

Spiceworks website (frontpage)

It's Free. Really.

 

Costs nothing. Never has & never will

[pete]

Ideally, Nagios for "X is down / under high load" and Cacti for graphing stuff to show bottlenecks / load averages over time.

 

Ntop gives a good overview of what's passing through your network. Ideally use it on a mirrored port (say between the ISP router and your core switch). You generally want it behind your firewall or you suffer s/n ratio problems.

 

All 3 of the above assume Linux as the monitoring system's OS. (you can make some of it work on Windows, but You're Doing It Wrong).

[gdoyle]

Apologies had my mind on another product - that's why I removed the post in the first place.

[plexer]

NetXMS ? Welcome looks interesting windows/linux install with documentation.

 

Ben

[sted]

You could look at nagios

 

anyone know of a good install guide for that i ju8st keep hitting silly walls with it and all guides i can find are based on really old linux distros

[pete]

anyone know of a good install guide for that i ju8st keep hitting silly walls with it and all guides i can find are based on really old linux distros

 

Do you mean install guides or do you mean "ok, it's installed......now what do I do?" guides

 

The old install guides (I assume you mean on the Nagios.org site) are still relevant - not much has changed wrt installing it. Here, for example Ubuntu Quickstart

[SpuffMonkey]

anyone know of a good install guide for that i ju8st keep hitting silly walls with it and all guides i can find are based on really old linux distros

 

I pay Cutter Project to sort our Nagios/Cacti box out - they're good chaps if you've some spare budget.

[ChrisH]

Dont forget our wiki people. Some of the stuff might be a bit out of date but for the most part it will be relevant. Nagios - Wiki

[pran]

We use Zoho ManageEngine OpManager. The free version allows you to manage up to 10 devices. Great for monitoring servers and routers. You can monitor almost anything (via WMI or SNMP) with great alert functions (e.g. email, SMS, Twitter).