In the world of networking, it is very important to know what your networks and servers are doing in order to avoid any disastrous situation from happening. If you are a network administrator or a support staff in any networking company, you will have to keep a close check on your network and you will need some tools for this purpose. Here are a few tools which are both commercial as well as open source that will smoother your task of network monitoring.
7 Most Useful Network Monitoring Tools:
Microsoft is a one of the tech giants in the world and hence there is a high possibility that the network monitor tool developed by them is quite efficient in its work. The Microsoft Network Monitor is actually a packet analyser that allows you to capture, view as well as analyse your network traffic. This tool is found to be quite useful for troubleshooting applications as well as problems on the network.
As its name suggests, it is a very easy-to-use tool. It is in fact a very lightweight tool which allows you to monitor both your remote and local hosts and ensure that they are in a working state. One of the best things about Easy Net Monitor is that you do not have installed it in order to use it. You just have download it, launch it and then use its services for free.
Cacti is probably one of the best network graphing tools in the present time. It is an open source networking tool which makes it easily affordable. Cacti is designed as a front-end application that allows you to monitor and graph CPU load, network traffic, network bandwidth utilization and a lot of other things. This network monitoring application with the help of network Weather map plugin even allows you to create live network maps that show utilization of link between different network devices. One of the best things about Cacti tool is that it is highly customizable.
This networking tool is very efficient in monitoring the TCP/IP network usage. All the data collected during this monitoring is then displayed in the forms of graphs and tables over different periods of time. This network monitoring tool is very easy to install and it runs discretely in the background. However, Wincap 3.0 or above has to be downloaded in order to install Bandwidth D.
Nagios is another powerful network monitoring tool that allows you to monitor all your critical systems, applications and services and ensure that they are working all the time. This network monitoring application even allows you to use plugins that will allow you to monitor applications, services and metrics in much better way.
It is another popular network monitoring tool that allows you to monitor network availability with the help of various networking protocols like SNMP, WMI, Netflow etc. PRTG Network Monitor Freeware also permits you to use web based interface and applications for iOS and Android devices.
It is a network resource monitoring tool that provides assistance to enterprises for analysing the latest trends in the research. It also helps network administrators to monitor the performance of their computers, networks as well as applications. Munin is somewhat similar to Cacti as it also gives results in the form of easy graphs.
Apart from these seven network monitoring tools listed above, there are several other useful applications like Icinga, NeDi, Zenoss, Zabbix etc. that can be used for monitoring the network. So find your ideal software now and start successful monitoring of your network.
We are currently using Cacti and i really liked how it monitors our server. Its easy to use and user friendly. It performs really good and so far its far the best monitoring software for us.