Without wanting to get into the whole Linux vs. Windows discussion, 'cos that's a never ending circle, I've used a product called PRTG quite a bit and find it very very effective. Yes, it's effectively a windows port of MRTG at its heart, but it's been substantially modified over the years and is now a very strong tool. Although originally a network monitoring tool, it'll also monitor other systems, websites, syslogs etc, so it can be as close to a one stop shop you can get. It's also got a very good approach to layering, dependencies, and visualisation. I heavily customised it when I last used it to build specific display boards to blend network states with data like job tickets open, web site load times/availability & stuff like that. I'mo not easily impressed with commercial software, but this was on the money for me. And at a decent price.... 20 nodes for free, and I think we got an unlimited license at the time for around a thousand bucks NZ. The support was very good as well, and they have a reasonably robust test & release cycle. I pretty much had answers to support calls within a business day (bearing in mind it's supported out of Germany) http://www.paessler.com Quoting "Jonathan Brewer" <jon.brewer(a)gmail.com>:
Hi Folks,
If you had it all to do over again, what would you use for network monitoring: Nagios, OpenNMS, or something else entirely?
I care about availaility, latency, loss, jitter, and trap handling for interface up/down, loss of power, etc. Sensible behavior in situations where parent routers/links are flapping is also important.
I would very much appreciate input from folks monitoring 1000+ network elements.
Cheers,
Jon
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