Network Management system for our LAN/WAN

[moh123321]

Hello Everyone,

We have a Cisco network covering around 350 staff, in 8 floors, and recommended Management system  to monitor the network , showing the bottleneck, performance, download speed for each client, it will be great if the tool is covering both LAN and WAN network.

Is there any free tools from Cisco can do the job? if not pls advise

Best Regards

[Marvin Rhoads]

Depending on the type of equipment you have, the free Cisco Network Assistant can be helpful. It only does limited performance management however.

Cisco's wired and wireless enterprise network management product for LANs is Prime Infrastucture.

On the third party side, you can put together a decent system using open source tools (Spiceworks is one good one, Nagios + Cacti for fault + performance are others). As far as paid products, some good entry level ones are ManageEngine OpManager or WhatsUp Gold. Moving up the stack as far as functionality would be the SolarWinds products (NPM for starters).

[moh123321]

Thanks Marvin,

Is Prime Infrastructure is free download app? is it unlimited?

Looks like it is mainly for lAN, any similar product from Cisco for WAN?

Best Regards

[Marvin Rhoads]

Prime Infrastructure is a licensed (paid) product. It covers wired and wireless, LAN and WAN technologies. Greater coverage of the WAN aspects (Netflow, AVC, etc.) is obtained via the PI Assurance license (in addition to the base Lifecycle license).

It is priced according to number of devices managed (Lifecycle) or interface/NAMs monitored (Assurance). For instance, list price for a 50 device Lifecycle and 25 interface Assurance license of a new (non-upgrade) license would be about US$10,000.

[moh123321]

Great Marvin.

Any recommendation for a freeware S/W to do almost the same tasks for Prime Infrastructure? is it recommended to have such open source/freeware apps?

Best Regards

[Marvin Rhoads]

Sure - just remember free to buy is not the same as free to own. Open source tools usually require a larger investment in configuring things yourself and usually (but not always) come without any sort of option for paid support.

Many people put together a system with Nagios (fault management), Cacti (performance management) and RANCID (configuration management). Each is free and community-supported. If you or your organization is comfortable setting up some Linux servers and customizing some files and templates you can have a quite workable system using those tools.

If you want a lower cost of entry with paid support options, consider something like Spiceworks, What's Up Gold, or the entry level products from SolarWinds (Kiwi syslog manager, cattools, engineer's toolset etc.).

[moh123321]

Let us concentrate on  Spiceworks, is it including a LAN/WAN management system ? or just an assets and ticketing system, where can I find it and under which menu because I downloaded it and it is not shown.

BTW : Is it a safe and secure program to be used in a medium size organization?

Thanks

[Marvin Rhoads]

You'll have much beter luck with spiceworks-specific questions on their forum:

http://www.spiceworks.com/free-it-community-network/

As far as safe and secure - it is a well-known and widely used product. I personally wouldn't have any concerns about either safety or security. However if your company is subject to specific legal or regulatory requirements with respect to open source software then you should check with your local authority.