Discussion on:

Five free network monitoring tools

I am pretty new to all of this and am looking for a tool that would allow us to monitor how much bandwidth each of our workstations (WinXP Pro SP3) is using (the server is running Windows Server small business 2003). Any ideas would be appreciated, it would have to be something free/cheap and easy to use. Thanks!

If your just monitoring bandwidth use, you might put a small network monitor app on each machine. The down side is that you have to go around and collect those figures before you can compare them.

A router could give you total bandwidth usage through whatever point in the network you place it but you loose the indavidual machine usage below it.

Munin maybe? It gives ongoing system stats measured at about five minute intervals. One of the metrics measured is NIC usage which would give you an idea of traffic in and out of the machine. It installs as a centeral server which reaches out to munin clients on each of the nodes to collect metrics. *nix nodes will give you much more information but there are some easy to setup Windows metrics also. I'm seeing disk usage, network usage, processes, cpu usage without any Windows specific setup beyond the win client.

ntop will give you network usage monitoring. Ideally it would be setup at a pinch point like before a router so it can see all traffic past that point. It should then give usage by protocol and by ip address.

Like anything, it depents. What is your intended goal? Do you just want to attribute bandwidth usage to machines or do you want something watching close enough to balance budgets against?

Spiceworks has a plugin that allows you to view bandwidth usage on a per device basis.

Try NetWorx. It needs to be installed on every machine you want to monitor, but you can set it up so that one of them collects data from all of the other machines.

Limited to just network monitoring:

Icinga - Tell me about up/down status (ping check), topical diagram with up/down and resulting affects showing, tell me about services (ftp, http, mail.. are they up, are they healthy), tell me about local system details (disk usage, users logged in, processor load). It gives more of a health/unhealthy result and/or alarm rather than metrics displayed over time. (Icinga is a fork of Nagios, if you know one then you know the other and howto/plugins have remained compatible so far.)

Munin - detailed machine metrics over time. If Icinga triggers an alert or the Munin overview is showing a warning then I can quickly get current, 24hrs, 7days, 1yr graphs in view. On *nix it's monitoring pretty much everything (over 50 plugins available when I take a quick scan). Igina provides the network overview and some related warning lights as a binary go/no-go indication. Munin gives me machine specific incremental details.

vnstat - provides network traffic usage statistics for the local machine. daily/weekly/monthly usage and such. It's a terminal app so you can view it over ssh or have it dump to email for you on a schedual. (darkstat provides similar details by html interface, ntop provides similar and more indepth details (but is crashy))

Extras beyond network monitoring:

git - provides version control and tracking for my config and buildscript directories. If something changes, then Git complains and I make a commit entry with comment stating that the change was expected or I investigate it further. For the buildscripts tracking helps since they are always evolving and it keeps them syncronized to a remote location. If something changes then refresh from remote location and rerun the setup scripts to replace anything amiss.

Samhain - just to toss in file verification, samhain screams loudly when it detects file changes. If something is not spotted in the network and does not show in the machine stats then hopefully it's caught by git or samhain when it changes a critical file.

(Then there is Tiger, systemcheck, john... )

ahh im a little gutted Zenoss hasnt made the list. I've just put this in as Spiceworks didn't give me real time monitoring especially on services stopping and starting etc. Plus the Zenpacks, though the volume cannot beat Nagios Exchange, has many handy little packages that have made our life monitoring HP and Dell servers brilliantly easy

I agree.

Agreed. I have been using Zenoss for years and have yet to find anything that can do so much, scales as well as, and it's so easy to use. It does a lot of things so at first it has a bit of a learning curve but I don't think there is anything else out there that can do all of what Zenoss can for free. BTW, I also use Spiceworks but they are completely different monsters. Spiceworks is a great asset tracking and help desk tool whereas Zenoss is an excellent enterprise monitoring software. IMHO the only competition out there for Zenoss (that I have seen) would be OpenNMS and I'll tell you it has an even higher learning curve. Both are great products used in companies managing thousands of nodes.

Highly under rated free app from Mikrotik, even a complete novice can have it up and monitoring in minutes, awesome discovery and solid muli-layer mapping abilities.

Try Netscan from SoftPerfect for quick discovery and status.

The Dude is an awesome network discovery and monitoring tool.
I use it from several year now and it is completely awesome.
Fully featured, easy to install and configure - it is a setup and forget app.

I'm looking for a monitoring tool that can monitor Extended MIB. We currently use Spiceworks, but that is a limitation for it. What is the best? Which has the best configurations? I do not like SysUpTime. It seems very cumbersome and clunky.

Thanks!

--James

One more to throw into that list is MXAlerts. They offer a free account that is perfect for companies looking to monitor a single email server. We monitor about 80 email servers and only 350$ a year. Not to shabby...

TheDude from MikroTik is also a great network monitoring app with a small footprint and very fast setup. And it can run on any old windows computer.

There is also FAN, Fully Automated Nagios
It comes complete as an appliance OS, with Nagios and centreon Databased configurator where all configurations can be setup via web browser

We also use Zenos but find a little harder a clunky to admin, better for servers.

I've been using PRTG for several years now. You can try it for free for 10 days and you can keep using it for 10 sensors only for as long as you like. For me the cost was very reasonable considering all that I am able to monitor. If I ever have trouble with a machine, router, switch or even certain services that I monitor, I can look back and see exactly when the problem started. Plus, the alerts have saved my butt several times. As "the" IT guy at our company, it is indispensable. I do have Nagios installed on my VOIP box, but haven't really looked at advanced settings for it. Maybe I need to....

Cacti which have alerting and reporting module
Check_mk is add-on above Nagios which is awesome http://mathias-kettner.de/check_mk.html
and if you looking for pure network management there are two great one
1. Nedi http://www.nedi.ch/
2. Metanav http://metanav.uninett.no/

Put together a good list but a few other good ones that we use. We use Quest Packettrap for the majority of our monitoring. Then use mxalerts.com for our exchange server monitoring. Mxalerts is a pretty simple and cheap round-trip monitor. Nothing too fancy but it does the job, not much more i can ask for.

You might have missed this wonderful free network monitoring software tool in the above mentioned list. ManageEngine OpManager is a complete end to end network monitor software.