Realtime Network Monitoring / Mapping

[robinshroom]

Hi,

I’m looking to improve our current curriculum network in school.

 

Our rough topology is fairly standard:

 

Main servers->Core switches->Edge switches->Client computers / Cameras / Phones Etc.

 

Has anybody got any experience with; or could suggest a hardware/software solution to look at, that could give me real-time feedback on switch to switch communication speeds / inform me of bottle-necks / loop backs and also map the network along with alerts to changes in the network such as a PC being un-plugged.

 

(And make me coffee too... )

 

Thanks,

 

Shroom!

[m25man]

Take a look at Quests Foglight Product.

Enterprise-Class Network Management with Foglight NMS

It's free for up to 100 nodes and should work for many smaller networks.

 

Takes a bit of tweaking but once configured gives pretty effective historical data of all switch port activity and if your hardware supports S-Flow some pretty impressive wan monitoring.

[Marci]

MikroTik Routers and Wireless - TheDude... s'brilliant. SNMP discover, realtime port monitoring, ability to negotiate routers, remote agents, built-in web interface too. Free!

[RTFM]

Whats Up Gold

[Elison]

here are the programs that you can try to solve your problems Network Software: Network Inventory, Network Monitor, Network Mapper, and Network Search Network mapping, monitor, inventory and so on.

[stratisphere]

If you're not shy, try Zenoss. Best thing is, it's all opensource and free. It can monitor pretty much anything via either agents installed on the servers or via SNMP (for switches, printers etc). Just shout if you want some links to guides/documentation.

[Chris_Cook]

Nagios and Spiceworks are worth looking at, and are both free.

 

I setup nagios to ping all our switches and a few external services every couple of minutes. We then have a webpage displayed on a pc in our office that shows a logical map of our network. It takes a bit of work to set up, but isn't that hard. It can do more monitoring than we use it for.

 

Spiceworks is useful for discovering devices and software on your network, you give it the ip range(s) to scan, and the user accounts for the computers, and it will automatically do all the rest. It will show software versions, hardware specifications, some warranties, toner levels on network (but not local) printers, and quite a lot of other useful stuff. It is a bit dependent on what hardware you are running, and the update frequency isn't really fast enough to do real time monitoring, but its really helpful for diagnosing issues. You can set it up to email you if devices are disconnected, or to email you when it finds new stuff. It also has a help desk module if you need one. I think it can do a bandwidth/time graph for some of our switches, but not all of them.

[Dos_Box]

+1 For the Dude. Very quick and easy to setup, and if you fancy something with a bit more 'ump' this will fill the gap nicely until you get up and running with it, however the Dude is very fully featured given it's small size.

[ccp]

The dude and Nagios are by far the best I have used.

[AB-AlexP]

I use Main Page - Observium to monitor device to device speeds as well as transit links, CPU, RAM, HDD, I/O etc, best of all its free

 

+1 for Nagios as well, I have used it to monitor around 200 device switch/router/server network without issue.

Edited February 1, 2013 by AB-AlexP