For bandwidth I would take a look at Cacti http://www.cacti.net/, it's free open ended and has both Linux and Windows base solutions. They have an older all in one installer if you dig around on the forums. Cacti can also be integrated with Nagios. Their is also MRTG http://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg/ for bandwidth monitoring, although I personally find Cacti a bit friendlier as it will dynamically update interface changes where MRTG needs to have the config file re-run.
As far as paid for solutions Solarwinds offer up some good tools for live time bandwidth monitoring per interface, 'Bandwidth Gauges' also has the ability to pump out a html file if you want to post it up on a webpage. They also have another useful tool called 'Router CPU Load' which will do live time monitoring of CPU load, although it says router I have been able to get it to monitor our Cisco Switches as well. If you are getting down to the bare wire with packet capturing looking for malformed packets might as well build yourself a Snort box. It's free minus support and can run on either Linux or Windows. Hope this helps, best of luck! Thank you, Fred Sawyer CCNA, MCP Network / Systems Engineer ________________________________ From: Joe Heaton [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, January 09, 2008 5:28 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Network monitoring tools I know we have these discussions every couple of months at least, but here goes: What are you guys using to monitor your networks so that you have an answer to the age-old user question of: "Why is everything running so slow?" I'm thinking of bandwidth usage first off, which I'm thinking PRTG to monitor that. I guess I could run a Wireshark capture, to see if there's a massive spike in weird packets. Anything else that you guys could suggest? I know someone had mentioned they use Nagios, but that would require me to setup a Linux box first, which isn't that big a deal, other than piecing a box together... Any other ideas? I'd like to do this without a lot of cost if possible, just because I hate spending money... ~ Upgrade to Next Generation Antispam/Antivirus with Ninja! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbelt-software.com/SunbeltMessagingNinja.cfm> ~
