Network Management tool

[ronshuster]

I am looking for a network monitoring tool that will provide me bandwidth analysis (incoming and outgoing traffic), latency, availability and anythign else that could be useful to understand how the network is doing.  I know that there are a lot of costly tools out there but there are also free ones, that is what I am looking for.  A tool that is easy to install, manage and use.

Any recommendations?

[raindrop18]

I would say cacti is the best, but I could't say it's easy to install.

[ronshuster]

Thanks for the feedback... do you have your own installation manual for cacti, ie. "cacti for dummies".

Any tips?

[raindrop18]

installation of Cacti itself is pretty easy on my opinion, on my personal experience other supportive applications was a little bit difficult since I am not expert on those area. if you have some experience or some one else able to help you with installation of (apache,mysql,php) you can accomplished your goal easily. also you can get help from cacti user forum. I am used this document as base of my installation and tweak a little bit based on my need.

once you installed cacti is very easy to manage and power full. currently I am using cacti to monitor more than 6000 interfaces from 200 different locations. if you have question down the road with installation, I will try my best to help you.