2 Network Monitoring Tools
After getting a basic knowledge about network management and the need for it, the next step is to know what tools are to be chosen for the purpose. Different monitoring tools discussed below.
There are plenty of offers for the tools, some are free, some are commercial, and some are for educational purposes. In this thesis work, free tools and the trial versions of commercial packages are discussed so that anyone can try and use them.
2.1 Network Baseline
Creating a standard network baseline is the first step to effectively monitor a network. An organizational network is regularly studied by network administrators to ensure that the network is functioning as designed and expected. These regular studies of the network…show more content… They are ipconfig, ifconfig, nslookup, net start, nbstat, and netstat. These are not discussed here because they are outside the scope of this document
9
2.3 Network monitoring software applications
There are lots of software tools available for monitoring devices, services, ports or protocols and analyzing traffic on a network. A few of these tools are discussed briefly below to provide an outline of network monitoring tools.
Different organizations need different types of tools based on their size, scope and requirements. It also depends on the organization’s staff and their technical expertise. Everyone wants tools which are of low cost, easily deployable and usable, and which have so many useful features.
As discussed earlier there are tools for use free of charge, commercial tools, and tools for educational purposes. Here we discuss some useful, feature rich, and open source tools which are available online for free and can easily be tested. They are discussed in their general aspects which make a network admin to choose them.…show more content… It is a very powerful tool but can easily be deployed. It should be manually configured for its full functionality. Some consider this as additional strain but option of manual configuration is the reason for its flexibility. It ensures that critical systems, applications and services in the network are up and running. It has powerful features such as alerting, event handling and reporting in high performance standards. The Nagios Core is the heart of the application that contains the core monitoring engine and a basic web UI. On top of the Nagios Core, one can set up and use plugins that allow monitoring services, applications, and metrics and also add-ons for data visualization, graphs, load distribution, and MySQL database
