Recommendations for a network monitoring tool

BKtje

Hi folks, have been asked to look into possible Corporate Network Monitoring solutions as the one we currently have is fairly basic (Servers Alive).

I was hoping someone would have a recommendation or two that i could look into.

Thanks in advance for any help/suggestions.

EDIT: It's a windows server environment with no linux machines/knowledge. This software doesn't need to be free.

FruitLover

Might be worth looking at nagios.

BKtje

Nagios unfortunately is designed to run on Linux which unfortunately we don't run here (and have very limited knowledge of).

I'll edit my initial post to mention this.

Thanks for the suggestion Fruitlover.

dade

is it for just monitoring traffic or monitoring the servers? if its servers what about op manager? think its free for a small number of nodes/services

BKtje

I probably should have put in more detail in my first post.

We currently have servers alive which pings the servers, access points, routers.
It also checks free disk space on servers and emails us if something goes wrong.
It's basically a warning system when something goes down.

We are hoping to get something a bit more powerful that would perhaps be able to let us know if a raid fails, reboot a machine, ensure databases and services are running and so forth. I infact came accross IPSentry which seems to do most of the things we need but i was hoping that since quite a few people here work in large organisations that someone else may have already done some of the grunt work/ are happy with a particular system

I'll take a look at op manager, thanks for the suggestion dade.

redhat_newbie

Follow this link for your likes clickhere

1) Ganglia, Nagios, Network Weather Service (NWS)
2) Ethereal, Wireshark

Cheers

BKtje

Cheers, lots to look at!

Kali

Network or service monitoring? Bit of a difference there.

For the latter, something like Zenoss (open-source and Windows compatible) or Solarwinds Orion (not free and Windows compatible) would be suitable.

BKtje

Kali, ideally something that would do both.

Thanks for the suggestions.

Godot666

We use a program called netcrunch, http://www.adremsoft.com/netcrunch/

Pricey if you only have a small network but you will wont need anything else!

Snowbat

The Dude was mentioned in Computerworld's Reader favorites: 10 great free network tools. As well as discovery/monitoring/alerting, you can add scripted TCP conversations as tests. You'll need to provide the data collection program to run on the target machine and the script to talk to it but that will be straightforward for anyone who's done any client-server coding.

videospot

Wireshark freeware, very powerful

BKtje

Thanks all, lots to look at.

Dmay

You might also want to look at whatsupgold from ipswitch. It's been years since I used it but from memory it was imple to set up. The trouble with solarwinds is that you also need t install sql server but once it's set up it's fine.