Monitoring and Utilization

Greetings!

My new employer has requested that I start a network study to see how much and what traffic is flowing to where from where and when. I know I can use wireshark for raw packet traffic but I was looking at something like MRTG to graph out network. For monitoring I was looking at Nagios. Time is as big of a deal as money. We are trying to do this for little or no cost. This is going to go directly to my manager so we can know how much we need to update are bandwidth. Any suggestions?

Found this list as well:

[FONT=Arial, sans-serif]http://www.slac.stanford.edu/xorg/nmtf/nmtf-tools.html[/FONT]

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Comments

Panzer919

Nagios and Cacti are the best free tools for this in my opinion. there is a bit of a learning curve since its all open source but there is a large community out there for support.

skyline

Nagios is a great tool. Once you get it setup and configured right that is.

Bl8ckr0uter

skyline wrote: »

Nagios is a great tool. Once you get it setup and configured right that is.

I was leaning towards Nagios. It doesn't look easy to setup however but I can do it at home first.

Panzer919

im getting ready to start a nagios and racid setup. if your servers are virtual you can always clone it when you get it working right.

Bl8ckr0uter

Panzer919 wrote: »

im getting ready to start a nagios and racid setup. if your servers are virtual you can always clone it when you get it working right.

I would probably have a physical *nix box for our monitoring. We should have several spares opening up very soon. This won't happen for a little while though as I have to get the QoS and switch configs ironed out. So much to do....

Panzer919

the lab manuals for bcmsn are really good for QoS. do you have a lab at work you can mess around in to get everything ironed out?

Bl8ckr0uter

Just my gear at home. I might pick up a 3550 just to work with. Thanks for the suggestion for the bcmsn lab manual. I also been told that the QoS book is pretty decent.