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.

 

[MacXG]

Does anyone know how much NAI Sniffer basic is?

 

[mikes999]

$11K-14K, depending on modules, laptop, etc.

 

[maxnpj]

Try Solarwinds. It is capable of monitoring, alerting, mapping, discovering, auditing, uploading/downloading your Cisco config and other functions as well. It does most of this via SNMP.

http://solarwinds.net

I have the Engineer Edition. You can download and try for 30 days. With maint & support it's $1000.00

Also, I just purchased (May of this year) a Sniffer Distributed Pro. It was 11K and change. It is the rack mounted device, not the portable, and really is a great tool. I have now discovered things I never knew were going on.

Also, I have Openview, and it might be a great tool, but it is a bit like driving the space shuttle to get a gallon of milk. It gets the job done but it is a bit of overkill for what I need.

With Solarwinds, if you want to see the route table or arp cache or interface(s) of a particular router, enter the IP, and then expand the appropriate tree. You are three clicks away from all that information. With OpenView, it is a bit more convoluted.

Anyhow, if you have 20K to spend, Solarwinds and Sniffer, and you are under budget.

 

[MacXG]

Fluke's Network Inspector works great for switches just make sure they are manageable (snmp). SolarWinds (Engineer Edition) for the price does a good job with switches (also has lots of other small, but useful tools)again make sure the switches are managable (snmp).