In this matter, which is rather vague and embraces many concerns, three types of tools are available:
- Services Monitoring Tools (and Outage Notification)
- Usage Graphing Tools
- Network Management Systems
Nagios is of the first kind,
Cricket and
MRTG are of the second. Both kinds may happily co-exist, and you often need both, if your network is important to you. It is often useful to know when something is going wrong, but also keep a log of those outage and prevent future ones by carefully analysing the usage.
Yet another type of tools, which may be related, is a tool to manage your network [
1]. Two good examples of these are HP OpenView and IBM Tivoli.
This is also slightly related to NIDS.
[
1] configure, extend, ... it
This article was first written in July 2003 for the
BeezNest technical website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/35)
Comments
Nice article, its supprising how many networks dont have network monitoring. There are so many free tools out there to do it.
Network monitoring has got me out of so many sticky situations.
I have installed nagios on my network and put the windows client on all off my servers. Its supprising how many times services become unavliable and then avliable before we notice. Its helped me so many times by fixing things itself before i notice.
Related, but not in the subject, there are also inventory tools like Open Inventory (http://open-inventory.sourceforge.net/) or OCS Inventory NG (http://www.ocsinventory-ng.org/), and Information Resource Managers like GLPI (http://www.glpi-project.org) you might find interest in.