Network Monitoring

[marcvu]

Can anyone suggest any good network monitoring or sniffing software.

Marc

 

[fynx]

Hi,
There are so many different network monitors and sniffers available. What is a good one depends on your requirements, how much money you have to spend, does it need to be portable, do you want packet decodes or to monitor application flows, etc etc.
I have been using an old (v5.0)DOS based "Sniffer" from Network Technologies for years and have got every pennys worth from it. Also the sniffer from Fluke is an excellent (very portable) tool. Visit some web sites and ask for a demo or evaluation.
If you've got no brass to spend there's plenty of free/shareware around, it's a case of finding something you like to use which gives you the functionality you require. Some OS's (HPUX, AIX, LINUX) come with packet capture utlities, often rudimentary, but they are there.
Have fun.
Phil.

 

[Guest_imported]

Network Instrument's "OBSERVER" is one of the best sniffer applications I have seen on the market. It is more robust than any other tool and does everything from packet decodes to full blown SNMP/RMON management.

 

[talisker]

If you want to monitor Cisco switches & routers then it's hard to beat the Solarwinds suite of tools. You can download a trial-version for free & see what you think.

If you want to spend more than $100K , checkout the monitoring tools by Peregrine Systems or Empowered Networks. These are excellent tools for enterprise LAN/WAN monitoring & troubleshooting.

 

[AidanEnos]

Hey talisker...

I tried the solarwinds stuff for another issue I was having and regardless of my success I still have an issue with that program!!!

It cause my Win95 machine to create a post boot "Windows is now setting up the following items" and then my desktop wallpaper disappears.

Any ideas?

It always worked before, there are no defualt or mandatory profiles and I can add it back but I want it to stop disappearing in the first place.

AidanEnos

 

[radoadmin]

For monitoring Cisco router and switches there are different tools available, the most of them using MRTG as the basic engine. The best I found is NMIS

http://www.sins.com.au/nmis/

it is especially prepared to monitor Cisco equipment and it is free. But you have to run it on a Linux/unix box, if you have enough time I think you can run it on a Windows box. For sniffing, one of the best tools is the good old sniffer, because you have the assistance of a very good expert system. But there is also a lot of free software available, especially on Linux.

 

[TripleL]

We use Etherpeek. It was very reasonable. For the price of one "Sniffer", you can get 4 copies of Etherpeek. They also have add on's so you can convert your trace to numerous different types of captures.

 

[krr]

For traffic statistics I use a combination of MRTG (SNMP backend), RRDTOOLS (database) and Routers2Cgi (frontend).

My favourite sniffer still is Ethereal.

All OpenSource and available for Linux and Windows.

Cheers *Rob

 

[vipergg]

I put my vote in for Network Instruments Observer 9.0 . For the money which is probably about 1/3 the price of network Generals sniffer pro . If you have some current pc's you can just buy the software which makes it even cheaper .

 

[Fisc]

You can download a demo of Network Observer at:

http://www.networkvisibility.com/Download_page.htm

Observer supports LAN/ WAN/ Gig/ Wireless/ VoIP. They have long term trending, web reporting and offer a SNMP management console. They have 2 week evals available. Email the sales department.

 

[TekRyan]

I have a 2000 user network, with 30+switches and 20+ router and firewalls. I also monitor about 10 racks of servers. Solorwinds Orion 7.1 is instant info/historical in one click, 5 minute install and setup. I also found a EZ sniffer to use called Network Packet Analyzer 4.0.

http://www.javvin.com/packet.html

http://www.solarwinds.net/Orion/Index.htm

When it comes to finding the issues quickly, this has worked for me.

 

[AdmanOK]

I personally use the following packages...

MRTG -

http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/mrtg/

PRTG -

http://www.paessler.com/prtg/

SolarWinds -

http://www.solarwinds.net

ipMonitor -

http://www.ipmonitor.com

ipMonitor is the one that watches my whole network for failures and then automatically notifies me (or tries to rectify itself!)

 

[NetEng631]

I go with Ethereal for a sniffer and I use HPOV and syslog for Network Management.

 

[jdel]

We have a rather large network to handle/monitor. internal and external clients. roughly 850 internal servers and some 3000 WAN links. we use a combination of HPOV, Netcool, Lucent's VitalSuite, Sniffer, Ethereal, FlukeNetworks WGA's and T1/E1 analyzers. We do a yearly assessment to see if any of the other management products will give us what we need (scalability, ease of use, reporting, and of course price).

We've tested MRTG, Solarwinds, Tivoli, etc., etc. None of them have been able to provide the same package of functionality that we've been able to achieve with what we have now.

My personal issue with Sniffers is they cannot handle being shipped. They break entirely too easy. Also, for a Sniffer to be most effective you need to know where the problem is and capture there. We've been very happy with the Fluke tools we've used in comparison, and they are exponentially easier to use. That's not to say a Sniffer does not have it's place. The Fluke tools will point you to the problem, the Sniffer will put the microscope on it.


Ethereal is a fantastic free tool. I highly recommend it. It has great filtering capability and is easy to use.

I haven't used Observer yet, but I haven't heard a single thing bad about it. I'll be interested to test it out later this year when we do our assessment.