network monitoring tools

Hi guys I know this topic has been discussed in the past. my company is looking for network monitoring tools.
I have used Netbrain and solarwinds, what are you guys using. How do you like it?
thanks

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OctalDump

Not a fan of Solarwinds...

Anyway, three that I suggest you look at are Nagios, Spiceworks and Zabbix.

alias454

We use PRTG it isn't cheap https://www.paessler.com/prtg. Nagios is good too if you hate yourself.

Mike7

Guess it depends on your budget and the scope.

The free ones usually require Linux. Spiceworks installs on Windows and seems good.

If you want graphing, Cacti or Observium should suffix. Main drawback is that they primarily support monitoring via SNMP only.

We use Zabbix as it supports agentless and agent monitoring. The Windows agent is able to grab Windows PerfMon counters natively and do not depend on WMI unlike other NMS agents. The alerting and action features are very useful, we can configure Zabbix to run server or host remote commands when a threshold/trigger is reached. For example, we have Zabbix send SMS or make voice calls with specific messages describing the error detail (e.g CPU is at 87%).

stlsmoore

We use SolarWinds Orion and I love it, but it took us 2+ years to tweak it and make it useful. It also performs other duties for us such as configuration backup and small scripting changes.

CSCOnoob

I've used quite a few but not extensively. SNMPc, Concord eHealth (bought by CA), EMC Smarts, Infosim StableNet, and SolarWinds Orion.

rebelution

At my old job we used Intermapper. We weren't very large (HQ and 35 Field sites) so it worked for what we needed it for (snmp, up/down status, basic link utilization, services monitoring, etc.).

Joe_Sagona

Nagios is by far the most popular open source network monitoring tool. There is tons of code out there to pick and choose from when working with Nagios. It has the largest number of plugins and quite easy to configure once you get the hang of it. Many criticize Nagios for being too noisy which can be a good thing in that it's reliable and doesn't miss a beat. My solution to this would be a tool like BigPanda, which plugs directly into Nagios, and correlates all related alerts into single incidents, so you're left with few items to check. Which ever network monitoring tool you go with I would look into an alert correlation tool as well. Saves tons of time!

kohr-ah

Open source would be Nagios.

Otherwise every place has always used solarwinds. I think the Orion tool is great. All the plugins however make the product a pain in the rump.

NCM is worth it for visual config backup and script pushing.

networker050184

I like Observium for a cheap (or free) monitoring tool that works pretty well out the box and easily customized.

stlsmoore

Really love the visual config backup feature; it saved our butts a few times when network hardware failed on us.

kohr-ah

networker050184 wrote: »

I like Observium for a cheap (or free) monitoring tool that works pretty well out the box and easily customized.

Out of all the free solutions I've seen this is really slick