Network Monitoring/Auditing

DjScientist

Hi guys,i need your help on this one.I am tasked with Networking auditing for my company and i've to give recommendations in 4days time.Its a Railway Company and we have like 10 servers hosting different Systems and Applications.Users are in a range of 1000-1500 mostly thin clients.I don't know if this information is relevant for the kind of help i am looking for.I know of Network Monitor only but are there any other powerful network monitoring tool thats can audit my company's network and let me give a full recommendations.This will be my first time to do something of this kind and would want it to be a success.

Thank you and i hope to hear from you all.Any suggestions will be appreciated please.

nel

If you give us a greater understanding of what you are looking for maybe we can advice more precisely. For example, what things are you looking to monitor? server health, disk space, network bandwidth etc etc?

Nagios seems to be a popular choice and has plenty of plugins. but like i say if you give specifics maybe we can advise a little better.

DjScientist

Thank you man,this is how it is:The network was last redesigned in 1994 and since then,nothing has changed except few additions of servers there and there.Number of users has since grown but thats not a problem cos the bandwidth was upgraded accordingly.Of late,the network has been very slow.Sometimes printing cannot even be performed,printout will just hang or citrix servers willl just freeze when users try to log in.The sad thing is that even just in the morning when everyone is just getting to work,the network will be so slow as if already people have logged in.
This is what am trying to find out:
The kind of traffic that might be causing congestiion,whether its just one machine,a server or a certain protocol that is running on the network
Bottlenecks for servers in the network
Network bandwith consumptions,server health and disk space which is most apparent in one of the citrix servers.

I hope what am trying to explain does make sense but if for some reasons am not making any sense and you seems to understand what am trying to explain,please don't hesitate to correct me.


Thank you once again

RTmarc

Orion SolarWinds.

paintb4707

Are you having these problems in a specific area or the entire building? Don't exclude Layer 1 from being a potential issue.

I had a similar problem for clients in our shipping dept. Network speed was extremely sluggish and dropping out intermittently. After literally weeks of troubleshooting, it turned out to be the fiber media converters. After I replaced them everything was perfect again.

DjScientist

I am having problem only in Headquarters.I have like 7 other locations(different cities) which are all connecting to the Headquarters for their internet,Printing and Files servers and they log into the main server located in HQ as well.They are not having any problem except those logging into Citrix servers which happen to be in Headquarters.Its a serous concern and CEO has already complained twice.I only have 2 months in the company and the task has been delegated to me to solve.am scratching my head,not sure where to start.

paintb4707

DjScientist wrote: »

I am having problem only in Headquarters.I have like 7 other locations(different cities) which are all connecting to the Headquarters for their internet,Printing and Files servers and they log into the main server located in HQ as well.They are not having any problem except those logging into Citrix servers which happen to be in Headquarters.Its a serous concern and CEO has already complained twice.I only have 2 months in the company and the task has been delegated to me to solve.am scratching my head,not sure where to start.

So the issue ONLY lies within your citrix servers?