Which Monitoring Tool is best to monitor LAN and WAN

[kuldeeprawat]

Hi,

CAN ANYONE TELL ME Which Monitoring Tool is best to monitor LAN and WAN.

Waiting for immediate response.

Thanks

Irshad

[lgijssel]

A fool with a tool is still a fool.

I am not suggesting anything nor am I trying to insult you but this oneliner is very true indeed.

It means that it is not the tool that does it but the one who is using it. You should pick what you feel most comfortable with. First check what you require from the tool i.e. what should it do at least.

For most network monitoring, a basic SNMP tool should be sufficient. Please check www.castlerock.com to see what I think of as suitable. You can download a trial version of SNMPc As I do not know your specific needs it is quite hard to predict if this will be a suitable proposal.

Goodluck with your choice.

Regards,

Leo

[kuldeeprawat]

Hi Leo,

Thanks for the information you have given to me.

If simple SNMPc is sufficient to monitor the network then what is the use of HP OpenView, Cisco Works, Cisco Wan Manager.

Please elaborate...

Thanks

[lgijssel]

To start with HP open, this is SNMP-based as well. As it is around for quite a while and delivers support for many vendors, it has become sort of an industry standard. Many other vendors deliver add-ons (even CiscoWorks) to support their products via HP open. That functionality however comes with a price. If you have plenty of money an a large network to manage, HP open might be your best choice.

Cisco Works and other -start-with-C- products are typically used to manage Cisco devices. If you have a fair share of non-cisco boxes around you will find that you cannot see or do everything with them that you might want.

One special thing about CiscoWorks is that it lacks a grapical real-time overview of the network. In my opinion this is a weakness in the product. On the other hand, it has many nice features to manage all kinds of Cisco devices.

My ideal solution is to use both a generic SNMP manager, SNMPc in my case, and CiscoWorks 2000. With SNMPc I can quickly see network node status and do some bandwidth management (baselining). CW2k serves mainly to execute changes (NetConfig) and as a syslogger. It is also used to perform IOS upgrades and to store config files.

I guess this could be done with HP open as well, but our money does not reach far enough to pay for both. SNMPc costs a lot less, both in purchase and in maintenance.

Hope this clarifies things a bit.

Regards,

Leo

[bberry]

We use a product called Solarwinds for our network monitoring. It can be found at http://www.solarwinds.net/

Brent

[paddyxdoyle]

Most of the larger companies i have worked for with Cisco based networks use HP Openview and CiscoWorks

Openview typically gets used for node down email alerts, SAN, HP server etc SNMP collector, plus a pretty map showing at a glance which device or network links are up or down.

Cisco Works is used to manage the Cisco infrastrucure including backing up configurations, SYSLOG collection, device up time reports, configuration and software updates, automtic Cisco device discovery, MAC address and port tracking etc etc.

Plus many also use MRTG stats which is GNU licensed and basically compliments both NMS systems providing by default graphs showing historical Router/Switch interface utilisation. However you can configure it to monitor any SNMP pollable value.

HTH

Paddy