network management software

[carl_townshend]

Can anyone tell me the best software to use for managing my lan/wan with all cisco equipment, like bandwidth monitoring, logs, alerts etc, Is cisco works the top software or is there another kind ?

thanks

[Fernando_Meza]

for device management and because this is a cisco forum then Ihave to say that CW will be the best .. for WAN bandwith analysis I suggest Netflow Analyzer 5.0 .. you might also want to check StatSeeker for device interface monitoring ..

Hope it helps ... Please rate if if it does !!!

[Marvin Rhoads]

How big is your network? Ciscoworks is very full featured and great for large all-Cisco networks, but it runs about US $20,000 list price. Many organizations may find this too much for a network consisting of several dozen devices.

Folks with smaller (and larger) networks have been happy with a combination of open source tools such as MRTG (open source) for performance reports (bandwidth utilization typically) and something like cacti (www.cacti.net) or OpenNMS.

Commercial products such as What's Up Professional (http://www.ipswitch.com/products/whatsup/professional/index.asp) or Solarwinds (http://www.solarwinds.net/Tools/Engineer/index.htm) are popular lower costs options. If you have a small Cisco network, also look at Cisco Network Assistant (http://www.cisco.com/go/cna) for some basic functionality, perhaps supplemented with one of the open source tools.

Hope this helps; please rate helpful posts.

[David Stanford]

From an earlier post:

There are a number of options available, it really depends on what your budget is for NMS software.

If you are looking at low cost you could go with MRTG for just snmp performance related stats:

www.mrtg.org

If you would like to do more you could go with Cisco Works LMS which would provide:

Campus Manager -- topology map, user tracking, path analysis

Resource Manager -- inventory, config management, software image management, syslog analysis

Device Fault Manager -- Notifications and polling

IPM -- round trip response, network performance and latency analysis

CiscoView -- graphical view of your devices

you could also consider other NMS applications such as NNM, but depends on what your budget and needs are

[mfreeman451]

MRTG is nice, but I think cacti is better (It is MRTG-like, but with a very slick interface. You no longer have to manually build your mrtg.cfg's or use the "indexmaker" stuff)

Also, I would recommend nTop if you're interested in doing netflow type stuff. There are other things out there too like "flowscan" that are really cool.

An IPM replacement could be "smokeping"

As far as configuration management goes, check out Opsware NAS (http://www.opsware.com).

[linker.team]

I am using Adventnet's Manage Engine Netflow Analyzer. You can generate all types of reports and troubleshooting from Raw data , alerts are awesome features to play. It suits all your needs and the support for each and every thing for the product is exceptionaly good.