Need a good network monitoring software 5

[mikes999]

I am in a dire and an immidiate need of a good network performance monitor; we have a reasonably complicated MAN (several hundred LANs - town infrastructure), need to be able to:
- monitor performances/bottlenecks from a single location accross routers;
- have an easy readable grafic interface;
- run in Wintel (W2K preferrable);
- being able to read Cisco and non-Cisco switches, routers and Netware and Windows servers;
- have extended alert/notification features;
- optional - have some reliable network topology discovery tool.

The project shall take off shortly, and I have to come up with something, besides the HP OpenView or CiscoWorks.

Insofar, I have testeed IPMonitor, LanMapShot and NetInspector by Fluke, and LANDesk by Intel - neither one seems promising enough.

All responses will be greatly appreciated,

Thanks

M.S.

 

[mpennac]

Question #1, how much money do you have to spend?

Question #2, are you looking for a single product, or are you looking for a suite of products that can be combined to solve the set of problems that you have.

As a company, we work with a number of network monitoring tools to help solve the problems you have mentioned. Some of these tools are free and some cost a LOT of money.

An example of free tools - MRTG - This tool does a great job of monitoring any SNMP MIB value, especially circuit utilization. It does require a fair amount of configuration, but for the price it is not a bad tool.

An example of a medium priced tool - What's Up Gold - Very good for red light/green light monitoring of both devices and the services running on those devices. Nice web interface and very good reporting capabilities to show what has been going up and down.

An example of an expensive tool - NetIQ's End2End - This is a great performance monitoring tool that will allow you to send both synthetic and real transactions across you network and measure the response time of these transactions. I currently have it monitoring a number of major websites and reporting the response time every 15 minutes. It will show how much time the DNS lookup took, the initial TCP connection and the retrieval of the web content.

I have yet to find a case where any single tool solved all of the monitoring challenges. You mention being able to read switches and routers. What information are you looking for off of these devices.

One of the tools you have tested (Network Inspector) is a fantastic tool for reporting on which switch and port a device is connected to. Additionally it has some very nice reporting capabilities when it comes to changes to the network and layer 2 configuration.

I hate to answer questions with questions, but the more clearly you can define the requirements of you network monitoring needs, the easier it is to identify a suite of products that will fill the bill.

 

[mikes999]

mpennac, thanks a lot for your input; the money we are going to spend on software is in low-to-mid 20K range, give or take. Besides that we eill probably need a portable network sniffer (hardware) - do you have any thoughts/suggestions on this one? I have zero experience with H/W network tools. What we basically need is a single point monitoring capability, preferrably in real time, bandwith permitting. Visual/audial/alerts warning of problems of certain severity. Monitored parameters should be port errors rate, port utilization, high traffic source (I am open to any additional ones). Some drill-down capabilities would be helpful.

Hope those detais are of any help to you to give more comprehensive advise, but I am really grateful for your assistance already. Thanks!

BTW, the Network Inspector was caught for incorrectly reporting some links, otherwise it is pretty impressive.

M.S.

 

[jrsavage]

Mikes999,

Check out the new Sniffer Investigator at

http://www.sniffer.com.

For the money it is an outstanding portable analysis tool that comes pre-configured on it's own dedicated laptop.

J.R.S.

 

[ACAC]

Check out NetworkVantage

http://www.compuware.com/products/vantage/networkvantage/

ACAC

 

[Highland]

Does anyone have a link to a site where all the above networking products are listed/highlighted....???

I'm also looking for networking management products and it's a nitemare knowing where to look....???

thanks...

 

[fortunat]

I have a links page on my site with various tools.

Go to

http://www.thetechfirm.com/links/index.html

Enjoy 'Making things work better; bit by bit.'

 

[mikes999]

Highland:

try WhatsupGold: excellent monitoring and discovery tool.

fortunat: thanks for the list, very good sniffer choice (ethereal) - used it in the past. Try Finisar Surveyor demo, not bad at all, and never expires...

M.S.

 

[Highland]

Thanks......

Fortunat, ur site has a load of brilliant links, just what I was looking for.....

Mikes999, I'll certainly try out your suggestion....

thanks.......

 

[fortunat]

I posted some sample Fluke reports and 1 sample NAI Expert report under the NAI and Fluke link. More to follow soon.

Enjoy 'Making things work better; bit by bit.'

 

[Guest_imported]

'Lo List,

I've been using a combo of What'sUP Gold with WebNM from Somix Tech (

http://www.somix.com)

to great effect. Provides up/down status to pager, email, etc. Also, combines MRTG in an easy to use report generator. My purchase for 23k, included What'sUP Gold, WebNM, and for a sniffer, Network Instruments Observer Pro with remote probes. That price was for installation and 2 years service.

Take a look before jumping into a 100k suite from HP or TNG.

 

[mikes999]

phreakingeek - I will not going with "fat boys"; most likely, I'll end up with WhatsUpGold for discovery/monitoring, with X-Vision for management, RealSecure for IDS and Finisar's TGH for pakets sniffer.

BTW, I checked out WebNM - the whole suite looks extremely impressive, although maybe not for us, since we already have many components in place. What's the approximate price for the whole suite, anyway?

Thanks, it was helpful.

 

[olddataguy]

Try the Appdancer/FA -go to the website and download.
This is an application monitoring tool.
for device management I also like the What's up Gold.
Eeye (SP) also make a nice software package.

 

[olddataguy]

Mike -

2 really interesting product to consider -

What's up Gold - from IpSwitch

http://www.ipswitch.com/products/

and the AppDancer/FA fro AppDancer Networks

http://www.appdancer.com.

Both are inexpensive and provide very interesting views.

Good Luck...TO

 

[mikes999]

Thanks - I am using WUG7.02 for a while. As for the applications monitoring, we've decided not to, due to budget limitations. For traffic monitoring I am using iperf - an excellent little tool to run on both Unix and Wintel platforms.

Free, too...

 

[odincronus]

I like HP OpenView, Ethereal, and What's Up Gold

All are affordable and easy to get used to.

 

[ASLtechnical]

Take a look at

http://www.analyserales.ltd.uk

You are bound to find what you want on there.

 

[meijoon]

Hi there!
To ACAC, what is the price of implementing NetworkVantage product from Compuware?

To manangers or techinal users, what is the common 'budget' to implement network analysis in a medium-scale company and how important is price compared to other criteria of evaluating a network management product?

Are you all comfortable with using Sniffer Pro generally? Or you'd suggest I try all the above suggested products?

Thanks for your advise.

 

[JJ1]

Try netsaint SNMP monitoring software

http://www.netsaint.org/

Totally free but only works on MacOSX, Linux, UNIX

 

[mikes999]

To JJ1: our folks are using it for quite a while - an excellent tool! I had it "married" with MRTG - looks even better now.

To meijoon: do you include IDS in your "network analisys"? For pure traffic analysing, I would go with frww tools, like Ethereal, tcpdump (there are several tcpdump data analysers) or Finisar (demo) - an exact replica of a former HPLanalyser (demo captures only 250 packets, otherwise - fully functional, including Expert view). Prices go as follows: SnifferPro Distributed - $35K, Investigator (a cutdown Pro) - $12K, Finisar Network (analog of Distributed)- ~$25K, software only - $5K. For IDS - Realsecure (about $7K per probe), or Observer (~$3K), although Snort1.8.7 and Kiwi Syslog (both free) do job beautifly (after a couple of sleepless nights, of course..

To ASLtechnical: thank you for the link, but... sorry, I am not impressed.