Best Monitoring software

cmuench · ‎06-28-2011

Hello,

I have about 8 cisco switches, 3 x 2901 routers, 3 x asa 5510 firewalls.

I'm new to the networking arena. what is the best tool to monitor these devices, collect logs, and see the traffic and port status?

I have heard about Netflow, cdp however I'm a bit confused on what I really need.

Free obviously would be best as I don't really have budget at the moment for any sort of monitoring software.

Chris

harsingh2 · ‎06-28-2011

Try Nagios. It's open source and you can tweak it based on your needs.

http://www.nagios.org/download/

Leo Laohoo · ‎06-28-2011

That small? Try Cisco Network Assistant. It's free.

harsingh2 · ‎06-29-2011

leolaohoo wrote:

That small? Try Cisco Network Assistant. It's free.

No offense Leolaohoo but at my previous job we had full blown modified version of Nagios (in house engineers tweaked it as it is all SNMP based) that we were using to Monitor large companies networks. I'm talking about companies like Sears, Cocal Cola etc.

If you have programming skills and know SNMP , there is no monitoring tool as powerful as Nagios.

manish arora · ‎06-29-2011

You should look into OPEN NMS , it's a combination of Cacti and nagios into one tool. It sounded pretty cool at the open software conference Scale 9x.

Manish

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harsingh2 · ‎06-29-2011

manisharora111 wrote:

You should look into OPEN NMS , it's a combination of Cacti and nagios into one tool. It sounded pretty cool at the open software conference Scale 9x.

Manish

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Manish,

That looks neat. Thanks for the heads up.

nikalleyne · ‎06-29-2011

I would also throw in another nagios based solution called Centreon. It has a great front-end for Nagios. I used this to monitor Windows, Linux, Cisco, etc. Basically once the end device speaks SNMP Nagios/Centreon can manage it. It even monitors the primary monitoring solution which is OpManager