Network monitoring tools

[Toby Schaefer]

-|-----Original Message-----
-|From: redhat-list-bounces at redhat.com [mailto:redhat-list-
-|bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf Of Ed Wilts
-|Sent: Thursday, August 12, 2004 10:11 AM
-|To: golharam at umdnj.edu; General Red Hat Linux discussion list
-|Subject: Re: Network monitoring tools
-|
-|On Thu, Aug 12, 2004 at 10:43:09AM -0400, Ryan Golhar wrote:
-|> Can anyone recommend a good, free network monitoring tool?
-|>
-|> I have a lab of about 20 Linux boxes connected to a switch.  It seems
-|> like every once in a while, the performance of all the machines drops
-|> dramatically, and I believe its related to the network, as all the home
-|> directories are NFS mounted, but not sure where.
-|>
-|> I'd like to get some sort of an idea of network usage and what is taking
-|> up the bandwidth.
-|
-|It depends on the switch. If the switch is snmp-cabable, then install
-|mrtg.  You can then monitor the traffic on every switch port.  Once
-|you've got the port hammered down, use something like ethereal to figure
-|out what the traffic is.
-|
-|--
-|Ed Wilts, RHCE
-|Mounds View, MN, USA
-|mailto:ewilts at ewilts.org
-|Member #1, Red Hat Community Ambassador Program

Ed,

  I just thought that I would let you know that in addition to good old
mrtg, I've been playing with cacti lately
(http://www.raxnet.net/products/cacti/) and I've been very impressed at the
newbie-friendlyness and database backend capabilities of it.  We've
converted all our switch graphs over to it here, and now my boss doesn't
have to ask me constantly what everything means -- with user level access we
can just show her the graphs that she needs to see!

Cheers,

Toby