What are some good tools to monitor routers?

dennylester · ‎01-25-2006

I am wondering what are some good tools for monitoring the health of our routers and circuits. We've always run with the SOHO mentality (hook it up and run it to death), but now we've grown to a point where monitoring is critical.

What does it take to log items like bandwidth utilization, error counts, BRI status, etc, etc.

What brings me to ask this is our frame cloud is starting to take perodic performance hits. I suspect we may have more remotes than our host can handle, but the problem doesn't seem to affect all remotes at the same time, so I'm not sure.

I know I can log into each and every router and look at the various statistics, but those snapshots don't paint a very clear picture.

I hope this makes sense.

Denny

m.matteson · ‎01-25-2006

check out http://cacti.net/. awesome. good luck.

rate if this helps :)

dennylester · ‎01-26-2006

The product looks very interesting and the price is right. The only turn off for me is it is a Linux product. I'm certainly not opposed to setting up a Linux box but was hoping for something that would run on Windows.

I read through their site and the reporting looks nice, but it looks like a lot of manual setup.

DO you know if there is a bunch of predefined scripts for Cisco routers?

m.matteson · ‎01-26-2006

oh ya i thought that it only ran on linux at first too. but you can install it on windows. if you do that then you have unlimited access to anything microsoft because of WMI. there are pre-built templates for cisco products that you can use.

mounir.mohamed · ‎01-26-2006

Denny,

You are talking in very wide area there is a lot of tools & command can be used to achieve your goal, 1st you may perform simple configurations that enable the monitoring on ur router for simple example

the below link contain most of the monitoring commands

http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product/software/ios120/12cgcr/fun_r/frprt3/frmonitr.htm

Ex:

Interface s0/0

Load-interval 30  to check the bandwidth on the interface every 30 seconds

ip route-cache flow  to capture the incoming/outgoing traffic on the interface

Also you may enable SNMP with RO community and use any monitoring application that can create a useful output with a graphs about CPU/bandwidth/delay/packet loss..Etc

Famous applications:

Cisco Works http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/sw/cscowork/ps2425/

SolarWinds http://www.solarwinds.net

Cyber Gauge http://www.neon.com/CGwin.shtml

MRT http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/mrtg/

Sure some of the above applications can downloaded through emule, kaza..etc

Please rate helful posts

Best Regards,

Mounir Mohamed