Route Monitoring?

cisco_trooper

Are there tools available to monitor the health of routes within your network? or something to detect and report on flapping routes?

Obviously in a small network it is not hard to spot things flapping around in your routing table, neighbor tables, etc. In a larger network these wouldn't be as easy to spot. Just curious because I want to start playing with these types of tools if they are available. I've found tools such as Snort and Cactii but I don't they think can report on flapping routes...

Paul Boz

That question is a can of worms. There are so many network monitoring programs and solutions out there it would make your head spin.

At work we use a combination of MRTG (really popular industry wide), Big Brother (snmp alarm mangement), Whats Up, Firehunter, and several others.

MRTG is probably the *best* for pure bandwidth consumption graphs and traffic flows but for actually knowing real-time link status Big Brother is awesome.

cisco_trooper

Anyone have any experience with this product?
http://www.packetdesign.com/documents/Route_Explorer_Datasheet_v3.0.pdf

Netstudent

I haven't seen this one before, it looks cool though. I'm wondering about how intuitive those graphs are though. Some graphs can be overly complex and take time to decipher. I'm becoming pretty fond of netflow and whatsup, actually. Netflow has good graphing a reporting software that is quickly comprehenable for traffic analysis, and whatsup is a good real time up and down alert.

Mrock4

I'm pretty fond of Solarwinds..but that's only because that was the first network monitoring software I had exposure to. You can do amazing things with it. I have briefly used Whatsup.

netstat

I would check out The Dude. (right... weird name) but it is a great NMS. It is free. http://www.mikrotik.com/download.html It is primarily designed to work with RouterOS/Mikrotik (i consider them as the cheap version of cisco (nobody beats cisco ) i have hooked up my ciscos and various other devices with it.