Monitoring tool for our external public IP address

[eandrcisco007]

I am looking for a reliable tool or service to be able to actively monitor our firewall and external public ip address to get the alert reports, statistics,  types with severity and ...

Any recommendation please?

Thank you.

[brachinus · Accepted solution]

We use a product from solar winds called IP Monitor which does a pretty decent job.  I have used PRTG as well in the past.  One nice thing with PRTG (http://www.paessler.com) is that it is free with a small number of sensors.  I am in the process of setting it up on my home network.

[eandrcisco007]

Great/Thank you for your input, i am certainly going to look into it shortly.

Thank you.

[devils_advocate]

Reliable and Free or Reliable and Paid for?

[eandrcisco007]

Either way...as long as they are reliable and dependable.

At this point, I would like to consider both options to get a better idea and then pick and choose .

Thank you.

[devils_advocate]

Its much of a muchness as most engineers have only used 1 or 2 different ones, at most.

I have used Solarwinds and thought it was great. 

[branfarm1 · Accepted solution]

There are a lot of options out there, depending on what functions you're looking for.  Over the years, I've used Nagios, Cacti, and PRTG (depending on number of nodes), Ganglia and Spiceworks.   On the paid side, Solarwinds NPM, ManageEngine, and SevOne.    It all depends on how much functionality you need, and how much you want to spend on a solution, either in dollars or time.   In my experience, free solutions will cost you your time (at least to get them going), while a paid solution will cost you money up front, but will be usable faster.

Also, let's not forget that Cisco offers their Prime Infrastructure to address your monitoring and management needs as well.