Network Monitoring ?

[anything I don't mind]

Do you know any good alternatives to Spiceworks, This is free network monitoring/inventory software. I also know of Solarwinds but that costs £2000 or so.

Even if the alternative costs some money, as long as it is not ridiculously priced, any ideas?

 

[droyden]

We use ipcheck which is faily basic (ping/http get) monitoring, for a larger network check out nagios

 

[jaket]

We use GFI - http://www.gfi.com/nsm

Good product, no false alarms. fairly cheap.

 

[#Chri5#]

PRTG is certainly worth a look

 

[edgedemon]

Another vote for Nagios - its very good

 

[m4cc45]

I use solarwinds (well Orion Network Performance Monitor to give it its correct name). I've found nothing that is as good as it. The historical stuff is a godsend when you are dealing with ISP's to prove downtime, etc. it's also very good at alerting on the Windows side (i.e. for low diskspace, machine off, memory usage, etc.)



M.

 

[paradigm]

To monitor... what exactly?

I find spiceworks to be bloated and resource hungry.

 

[Ev0]

To monitor... what exactly?

This, what is it you want to monitor?

 

[anything I don't mind]

Thanks for the replies.

 

[bigredshark]

Just for note, nagios is the most useless network monitoring platform I've ever come across, it's fine for servers (for free software at least, I don't rate it massively in comparison to other products) but it's hopeless for any serious network monitoring.

 

[beavis]

Opmanager is nowhere near as good as Solarwinds, but does similar (SNMP/WMI) things for much less cash.

 

[ruffneck]

zabbix looks great but I'm still yet to try it

 

[DiscoDave]

Vote for Open NMS for me. Currently got it running at my workplace.

You probably also need to look at how you want to monitor whatever it is you want to keep tabs on. Open NMS is very passive, it will probe port numbers and TCP banners to ascertain whether a service is running or not. Therefore no client needs to be installed on each node.

I use Open NMS for two major things:

- Monitor servers for overall availability and for specific services (ie Open NMS can tell when an entire node is down, or just when a particular service - for example, SMTP is down)

-Monitor network equipment. Open NMS can also be a management point for SNMP traps. At the moment I have my switches directing their SNMP traps to Open NMS. With this I can monitor ICMP response times/TCP open sessions/TCP errors and failures/etc.

It's also open source and after looking at Nagios and Open NMS, I beleive Open NMS has much better visibility and general presentation.

 

[Xez]

PRTG is certainly worth a look

We use this and it's quite good although I haven't used anything to compare it to

 

[anything I don't mind]

Where i am working at the moment they have PRTG as the main network monitoring software. They also have spice works installed but it was not updated for 6 months. I will look into open nms that looks cool.

off topic:
I laughed cause i just spent 6 months at a bank and have learnt more in three days at the new site than i did in 6 months.

This guy has been showing me the SANS and DFS

 

[dave-lew99]

Been using OpenNMS for a while and it's pretty good (for free).

A friend of mine is currently raving about PandoraFMS, which i didn't' like but he loves (i wanted an agentless approach which isn't the Pandora way).

At the moment i have a bit of a 'heisenberg' device on our network - if i monitor it, it goes down, if i don't it's more or less fine.

(Draytek 2820, being ditched ASAP)

 

[SMN]

Nagios for Servers, NTop for the gateway? Or just port mirror all the switch ports to a dump port and plumb Ntop into that interface and analyse away

 

[bigredshark]

Or just port mirror all the switch ports to a dump port and plumb Ntop into that interface and analyse away.

That's a fairly horrible cludge for traffic analysis, sflow (or cflow/jflow/etc by vendor) is a much more sensible way to do traffic analysis unless you absolutely must see every packet...