I need a good network monitoring tool

Question

I need to get some good network monitoring tools. I am trying to find out why my office network is so congested/slow, and I need something that will allow me to look at all the machines in the network and see who is being a piggy.

Answer 1

Nagios

This is one of the most popular web based Linux monitoring systems nowadays, actually it’s industry standard for IT infrastructure monitoring. Licensed under GPL Nagios is available for everybody free of charge and allows to monitor availability and response time of network services, usage of system resources like CPU load, RAM allocation etc.,

Project’s homepage: http://www.nagios.org/

Cacti

Cacti is another web based monitoring system written in PHP and licensed under GPL. Unlike Nagios describe above Cacti was designed mainly fo the graphs

Project’s homepage: http://www.cacti.net/

Zabbix

Project’s homepage: http://www.zabbix.com/

MRTG

Project’s homepage: http://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg/

Nfsen

Nfsen is open source Netflow collector and analyzer available under open source license. It differs from monitoring tools described here — Nfsen collects only network usage data and shows the interactive graphs based on that data.

Project’s homepage: http://nfsen.sourceforge.net/

Those are Web based network and system monitoring. If you want desktop applications i would recommend you to use etherape. You can install by:

sudo apt-get install etherape

Answer 2

On a few ocassions I used EtherApe to locate a rogue file-sharing app hogging office network bandiwdth. It is availabe in the Software Center.

Whether it's going to help you depends on your network topology - in some (many?) cases your machine's NIC only sees packets going between your machine and the router.

Answer 3

you can also use nethogs. you can install it by

sudo apt-get install nethogs

you can launch it by

sudo nethogs <connection_name>

for example

sudo nethogs ppp0

for example:

Answer 4

SmokePing

SmokePing keeps track of your network latency:

• latency visualisation.
• Interactive graph explorer.
• Wide range of latency measurment plugins.
• Master/Slave System for distributed measurement.
• Highly configurable alerting system.
• Live Latency Charts with the most 'interesting' graphs.

Project’s homepage: https://oss.oetiker.ch/smokeping/index.en.html

Demo Site with live graphs

To install enter the command:

sudo apt-get install smokeping

See this page for some additional Perl module requirements.

Answer 5

Assuming you have access to flow data, ntop might actually be a great solution. http://www.ntop.org/products/ntop/

Quick synopsis:

What ntop can do for me? - Sort network traffic according to many protocols

• Show network traffic sorted according to various criteria

• Display traffic statistics

• Store on disk persistent traffic statistics in RRD format

• Identify the indentity (e.g. email address) of computer users

• Passively (i.e. without sending probe packets) identify the host OS

• Show IP traffic distribution among the various protocols

• Analyse IP traffic and sort it according to the source/destination

• Display IP Traffic Subnet matrix (who’s talking to who?)

• Report IP protocol usage sorted by protocol type

• Act as a NetFlow/sFlowcollector for flows generated by routers (e.g. Cisco and Juniper) or switches (e.g. Foundry Networks)

• Produce RMON-like network traffic statistics

Answer 6

In case you need a really quick and easy solution you may try one of cloud-based monitoring services: they normally doesn't require you to go through full-scale installation and configuration process and you can set up simple cross-ping and SNMP relatively quickly. I may recommend the one I'm involved with: Anturis, but there are several others as well, such as Monitis or Panopta.

Answer 7

Bandwidthd

BandwidthD tracks usage of TCP/IP network subnets and builds html files with graphs to display utilization. Charts are built by individual IPs, and by default display utilization over 2 day, 8 day, 40 day, and 400 day periods. Furthermore, each ip address's utilization can be logged out at intervals of 3.3 minutes, 10 minutes, 1 hour or 12 hours in cdf format, or to a backend database server. HTTP, TCP, UDP, ICMP, VPN, and P2P traffic are color coded.

Download from here.

Read more about here