Too vague.. how much network management? enterprise? local? lan?
A good start is Solarwinds. A cheaper enterprise level or workgroup level is SNMPc from CastleRock. If you have the bucks and the need, then HP Openview is pretty much the defacto standard tho' some will argue for Tivoli (spelling?)
It really depends on what you mean by management. A good syslog server is invaluable.. there are log file tools which help also.
What kind of information do you want to collect?
up/down status
Interface errors
status of bandwidth
faults
device status (CPU, memory, buffer utilization)
Config change/control
If you are looking at simple network traffic and you have a Cisco pure environment, Ciscoworks is good. I forget which package has it, but I think it is Ciscoworks for Windows which includes What's Up Gold built into it. It should cost you around $2800 depending on the deal you can find.
HP Openview Campus is your next choice. It exchanges the configuraion management functionality with a slew of other bells and whistles to include event notification and alarming. Its the dog, but you will only be able to manage 250 nodes, not a problem with your network it seems.
Of course, if price is the issue and you want something simple, Mike is correct with his assessment of Solarwinds as a good choice.
I'm using Solarwinds to pull Stats on ISDN,Frame, LAN Extentions and VPN's. HP Openview for the status of all Switches, Router, Servers and all other Devices. Our Switch manfacturer has a product for managing the switches which is helpful.
Solarwind is handy because it has a number of tools, IP Mgmt, Net Perf, security etc.
The bargain basement solution:
- For uptime/downtime & status I use What'sUpGold.
(it does more than this of course.. check it out!)
- For BW tracking, I use MRTG (free). It just polls the interfaces for their 5min avg stats and graphs them daily/weekly/monthly and yearly. Very customizable too. If you learn your MIB's you can graph anything against time.. CPU, disk utilization, etc etc. It spits out PNG files that you can use in your own custom monitoring web page for ex..
- For other tracking, Kiwi Syslog server ($70? for full version ..) I log parts of my ACL's (security) as well as BGP/OSPF changes, interface ups & downs etc etc. With the full version of Kiwi you can log to MSSQL and then do neat things like run Crystal against it to see uptime, downtime, # hours out of service by circuit etc etc. Great for enforcing your SLA with your ISP too!
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