From: Leigh Harrison (lharrison@Everlogic.com)
Date: Thu Apr 14 2005 - 07:31:00 GMT-3
Mal,
The obvious choice is going to be CiscoWorks and the various bits and bobs that come with it, you'll do well to find any better. If you've got the budget. However, I have worked at several places where the budget for network management has been #0. In these places I found that I had to learn a bit of unix/linux to use some very good open source packages. The best that I came across were:-
Ethereal (www.ethereal.com)
sniffer program
Ntop (www.ntop.org)
Traffic analsys program, reads captured packets and traces to provide very friendly traffic breakdown. Can be used with remote probes to sample traffic flows all over the network.
MRTG (http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/mrtg/)
Snmp grapher. Can be used to graph anything with an snmp string, not just cisco, such as traffic throughput, memory usage, sessions through a firewall, hd space free, cpu usage, etc, etc. It will only take a sample every 5 mins. If you want more often samples, have a look at RRD tool (http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/rrdtool/). For some sample mrtg scripts, have a look at http://www.somix.com/support/mrtg_repository.php
Nagios (www.nagios.org)
This is the monster of monitoring. Takes some time to get set up properly, but when is up an running will monitor everything. Set up groups, set alarms on thresholds, etc. It will draw a map (3D one if you like), provide you with as many graphs as you could ever want or need, it can monitor your rrd/mrtg graphs and alert on them too. Oh, and it has a wap interface for mobile phones too.
Hope this is of some help.
LH
Ps: LANBase is an interesting company name, I worked for Workplace Technologies when they bought the company in 1999 !!
-----Original Message-----
From: nobody@groupstudy.com [mailto:nobody@groupstudy.com] On Behalf Of malcolm.price@lanbase.com
Sent: 13 April 2005 11:10
To: ccielab@groupstudy.com
Subject: OT: Network Management Packages
Guys,
Sorry for the OT, but I was wondering if anyone had any first hand experience with Network Management Packages deployed into a pure Cisco environment.
Having just deployed a large Metro Ethernet Network within the UK to deliver broadband services and video to public sector, I was looking to source a good Network Management Package based on Layer 2 ethernet and layer 3. Not so much to do configuration, but diagnostics, fault finding, to monitor load, util., errors, and general reporting on the performance and uptime of links / switches etc. All the WAN Links are BT LES 10/100 Fibre and are presented as Ethernet between remote sites and are driven by 3550 Layer 2/3 switches and some 6500's thrown in :).
Any feedback would be great,
Regards,
Mal
CCIE #10607
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