Network Monitor Tools List

Network Monitoring Tools:
Well I have real world experience as an administrator using many network monitoring tools, the main
ones I have used are: Nagios with Oreon interface and many custom plugins, MOM (Microsoft Operations Manger 2005), CA-NSM r3.1,r11.1(Computer Associates, Network System Monitor), HP-OVO.
I have written many scripts to monitor many different parts of a network,Like:
– Scannig 600 server eventlogs for a single event
– Monitoring email flow, generating reports of top email traffic accounts
– Pinging servers and controling time down, time up
– Checking the size of a specific file or folder changes
– Checking the status of all patches installed, comparing and keeping track
– Control who is loging into servers
Well I wrote many more scripts, but I would like to keep it down to the tools avaible out there,
and I start by saying all networks are different, true. But all have the need to be monitored, the job
of a System Administrator priority is to detect troubles and fix them as quick as posible. All of these
tools, have great notification technology, such as send SMS, or email, logs etc…
In today’s dynamic marketplace, companies demand a high-performance infrastructure to support their business
initiatives and meet the service expectations of employees, customers and partners
NAGIOS,
In my own opinion Nagios is really ahead of all others, first because it is free, there are a strong community support, with many developers and administrators creating scripts and tools to monitor every single type of OS, hardware, software out there. It is so easy to create a new plugin that I am sure you will find support for whatever it is that you need to monitor, sites like Nagios Exchange are great source of add-ons. The basic interface can be upgrade to the nuova style (just an CSS), and can also be completed upgraded using Oreon (centreon), GroundWork and others. There are tools specific for graphic like nagvis, reporting. With nagios there are no limits of what can be done, you can even scale to large enviroments, if you wish you could make a cluster of it. I have personaly used and setup Nagios and a Wiki like MediaWiki that makes the perfect Monitoring and Documentation of any network demand.
Take a look at these Screenshots of: Basic Interface, Nuova Style, GroundWork, Oreon 1, 2, 3.
I have also written this tuttorial on how to setup Nagios from zero.

HOW TO INSTALL UBUNTU 7.10 NAGIOS 2.11 CENTREON 1.4.2.4
http://www.felipeferreira.net/?cat=8&paged=2
VMWare Imgae of Nagio With GroundWork:
http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/330
MOM 2005,
It works very well with Microsoft products, but unfortunately a network is hardly made only by MS, how about monitoring
a Cisco router, well it can be done but it is not all that easy. Once I had to monitor when a port of a cisco is up or down.
With support of SNMP it can be done, but I found it so difficult to get an argument of alarm and pass it to a script,
but in the end I was able to recreate an alarm custom fields. Here is the script
So MOM is great for Microsoft, it comes with many pre configured checks and the hardest part will be to identify from
all the alerts it generates, what is a real problem and what is MOM own paranoic. Well it can take time to identify
and understand all alerts generated, but its not dificult to disable or modify the monitors it performs.
For Microsoft network, great but limited, for example to monitor multi domain enviroments is something
In the alert, MOM 2005 tells you what is wrong, what the most common causes of the problem are, and the likely initial
steps to fix the issue. Whether these issues have a large impact or are unnoticeable to the end user,
resolving them quickly has two effects. If the impact is large—say an Exchange server mailbox store
is down—then quick resolution is the obvious goal, with obvious benefits. If the issue is small, for example a
missed Active Directory (AD) replication cycle, then fixing it now often prevents a small issue from causing larger
issues that will continue to snowball until you have a major outage on your hands. Being able to fix small issues
promptly because you know what is going on in your environment lets you be proactive. This is the biggest benefit
of successful operations management

CA-NSM Unicenter,
Unicenter is recognized as an industry standard for total enterprise management, ensuring the health and performance of your organization’s entire infrastructure. . To that end, CA offers Unicenter as a family of modular, as they have specific modules like: Database Management, Web Infrastructure Management, Application Management, Automated Operations Management, IT Resource Management and Service Management. All very expensive.
My experience (about 1 year) with Unicenter r3.1 is not a good one, the program is confuse and most of the times you have 2 or 3 ways to perform the same things, the way to configure the alarms is terrible! You cannot in r3.1 change the configuration of the agents of more then one at a time, so if you monitor 50 hosts and you want to change one little thing you would have to do one by one. I wrote I script that would do the changes in all 90 hosts I am monitoring. There are some cool things as the BPV (Business Process View),the 2d-Map, the web portal can be easly customized with views for each profile.The agent is about 400mb, its big and heavy. It should work nice if the company has Service Desk, CA solution for ticketing software and all integrated together, but to get it setup will not be an easy task. One of the worst things, there are no community support,
no online help, no open forums or nothing. You need help better call CA and open a ticket.

HP-Open View,
HP OpenView is a key component of the HP Adaptive Enterprise strategy that integrates people, processes and technologies for both large enterprises and service providers. The demo area consists of about 20 systems that
run the whole portfolio of integrated HP OpenView and partner solutions like SAP or BEA.
1. IT Service Management
2. Operations Management
3. Windows Management
4. Web Application Management
5. Network Management
6. Telecom Management
7. Storage Management
ref. http://www.openview.hp.com
Free and good Monitor Tools

PANDORRA,
Pandora FMS is a monitoring software. It watches your systems and applications, and allows you to know the status of them.
Demo here (user:demo, pass:demo)
http://artica.homelinux.com/pandora/index.php?sec=messages&sec2=operation/messages/message
VMWare Appliance Image Version 1.3.1 Download here:
http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/1236
Zabbix
ZABBIX offers advanced monitoring, alerting and visualisation features today which are missing in other monitoring
systems, even some of the best commercial ones.
* Flexible auto discovery
* Centralized distributed monitoring
* Advanced WEB monitoring
* Better templates
* XML data import/export
* More scalable user permissions
VMWare Appliance Image:http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/353
OPSView
Another Nagios based monitoring tool, with poor Web interface compared to Centreon.
I have a post just for them here
OpenNSM
Its an open source high class monitoring tool
penNMS is the world’s first enterprise grade network management platform developed under the open source model. It consists of a community supported open-source project as well as a commercial services, training, and support organization.
You should have read access to all content on this wiki, but you will need to register to add or edit pages, or upload files or images. OpenNMS is community supported, so you are welcome and encouraged to add content to this website. Your registration information will not be used outside of this wiki.
I recommend you to try the demo here:
http://demo.opennms.org/opennms/

OpenManage

Dell OpenManage^TM 4 is the first hardware change management solution that leverages existing OS management applications. It Integrates with Microsoft® Systems Management Server 2003 to let you manage both server software and hardware in one console.

OpenManage 4 presents a comprehensive set of capabilities for simplifying systems management and drawing more value from your servers, including:

• Open, flexible tools to standardise and automate processes
• Centralised management of distributed systems
• Remote, anytime access to your Dell PowerEdge servers

Like it says, it is made toward monitoring Dell server and working well with SMS. But dont believe its flexible, at least comparing to nagios. Try monitoring a disk using SNMP for example, a simple task becomes imposible. How about monitoing Cisco systems? Well… like many others its made to monitor its tools, but not all network or all server.
More info
ServersCheck Monitoring
Software description:
A tool running on Windows based systems for monitoring, reporting and alerting on network, servers and other IT systems availability.
ServersCheck Monitoring was designed to be a tool running on Windows based systems for monitoring, reporting and alerting on network, servers and other IT systems availability.
In addition to monitoring regular network devices, the program can also can monitor environmental devices like temperature, humidity, flooding. ServersCheck Monitoring Software runs as a local service and is administrated via a browser based interface. Additional features include alerts and graph output for long-term statistics tracking.
Here are some key features of “ServersCheck Monitoring Software”:
· Over 60 different check types
· The software can monitor devices using PING, any TCP Port (HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, NNTP, POP3, SMTP, VNC, DNS, etc.), perform database checks (ODBC, Oracle, MySQL), get SNMP data, monitor Windows servers (disk space, free memory, CPU usage, running services/processes etc.), verify content served from a web server, Linux and Unix systems, and much more…
· Alerts
· When an error is detected, the software can alert users using multiple options: email, SMS (text messages), voice call (modem or Skype) and much more. Alerts can be sent to individual users but also based upon team settings with escalation optons. With a GSM Modem for SMS alerts, a user can acknowledge the alert by sending a text message back to the software.
· We speak your language
· The software is accessed using a browser or a mobile device (phone, PDA). This enables to have a view on your servers and network availability anywhere any time. It can run in HTTP or secure HTTPS mode.
· Autodiscover devices
· ServersCheck will autodetect running servers, pc’s and other equipment in your network by scanning it. Each device will be automatically checked through a PING check. You can add more checks to the discovered devices.
· The software does not require any software to be installed on the servers or other devices it monitors. It uses system native protocols such as TCP/IP, WMI, SNMP, etc… to query the devices. Only for monitoring NIX based servers a free agent has to be installed on the remote systems.
Requirements:
· Intel Dual Core or higher recommended
· 100 MB of disk space
· BUSINESS edition: 512-1GB MB of RAM
· Internet Explorer 7
· Firefox 2+
· Google Chrome
· GSM modem is required for SMS alerting through cell phone network
· Voice modem for alerts through phone calls
The Dude
The Dude network monitor is a new application by MikroTik which can dramatically improve the way you manage your network environment. It will automatically scan all devices within specified subnets, draw and layout a map of your networks, monitor services of your devices and alert you in case some service has problems.The Dude demo system: A RouterOS demo routers are viewable from within the Dude, install The Dude and connect to our Demo dude system with the Dude Secure connection to 159.148.147.209
Also available is the web version of the Dude interface

http://www.mikrotik.com/thedude.php
A list with more Network Monitor Tools:
http://host-monitor.safe-install.com/
or
http://www.monitortools.com/enterprise/
My opinion about Nagios is also shared by CIO of Rudolph and Sletten Sam Lamonica  who said:
…”I was looking for a monitoring surveillance tool that would allow me to identify, detect and … troubleshoot problems long before the phones started ringing or the executives beat me up in the hallways because the network was down.”
Lamonica acknowledges that his short list, which included proprietary solutions such as OpenView (now HP Software), Unicenter, and BMC Patrol (now BMC Performance Manager), also featured GroundWork Monitor Professional, a tool that he had used with great success at a previous company. In fact, in previous jobs, he had rolled out, used, managed, and supported all of the aforementioned solutions“….
http://www.linux.com/feature/144003?
In my own opinion Nagios/Centreon is simply the best out there:
http://www.nagios.org/propaganda/mediasightings/
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