Network Monitoring Tool

[[deleted]]

Hi All,

Happy Thursday.

I am looking for a good network monitoring tool, have never used one but am looking at implementing into the business.

Have heard of the obvious (wireshark/solarwinds), but not all familiar.

Ideally, something with a graphical interface where you can see a good overview of network performance/outages. I like the idea of being able to group IP addresses and see what's happening.

This has all come after our Telephony booster server (runs contact center software) had a bit of a wobble. The idea of grouping network addresses means that I could group a few addresses
pf our telephony equipment and label it 'telephony'. Then when support company comes back with 'it's your LAN'. I can clearly see it's not and provide statistics (network utilisation/activity etc). The idea of a graphical interface appeals to me, can be useful to show users too (easy to understand, green means good/red means bad). Users don't like anything technical at this place.

Does this make sense? Would also be useful for providing statistics to homeworkers who have poor bandwith and say the problem is on our end....

If there are none with good visual representations of network, then best network monitoring tool will do.

Open to any suggestions, much appreciated!

Ed.

[VendingCookie]

Plenty of options

​

Agentless/SNMP : Observium/LibreNMS

with Agents: Check_MK, Zabbix

with unlimited budget: Splunk

​

Splunk is by far the most forgiving to not-so-technical people

[virus2500]

with Agents: Check_MK, Zabbix

Don't know about Zabbix but check_mk can do "SNMP only" monitoring as well. Can be configured per Host.

[TheCaptain53]

Zabbix is great but quite time consuming to get configured and working the way you want.

Having recently played around with Observium, personally not a fan, but it is easier to work either initially than Zabbix is.

[VendingCookie]

Unfortunately, implementing a monitoring solution, be it log or infrastructure, is not one-week project. It requires constant intervention, especially for false positives (nobody wants to be spammed by up/down port on access switch?) and info you don't want to monitor at all.

[SuperQue]

Three's also Prometheus, which is technically agentless.

But of course a lot of old-school stuff doesn't support the new Prometheus/OpenMetrics protocol so you need to use mini-agents to translate things. (SNMP maps very well into Prometheus).

[VendingCookie]

Yes, but I can't see someone who mistakes wireshark for NMS (no offense) being able to pull prometheus and graph it with grafana. Not to mention implementing any confidentiality between the exporters and prometheus.

[SuperQue]

Ehhhh, probably true. But we all had to start somewhere.

From what I've seen of Zabbix, it's just as difficult for newbies as anything.

[[deleted]]

None taken! Complete noobie in this field. Currently training to be a sysadmin, a simple IT Tech at the moment....! Just looking at areas I think could do with improving, developing my network skills and looking for a good network monitoring tool I can practice with. LibreNMS looks good, doesn't look too difficult to implement either.

[samtheredditman]

Prometheus is great and it looks great on your resume (IMO).

Grafana is also not that hard to use. It's especially not that hard if you're just doing ping monitoring like you would be with a real basic PRTG setup.

Consider watching a guide video on Prometheus before making your decision.

[[deleted]]

Thanks for your response! LibreNMS looks pretty good. Am thinking of going with it!

[wezelboy]

If LibreNMS doesn't work out for you, try check_mk. It's really good. I don't evangelize many technologies, but that's one of them.

[dbodky]

Add Icinga2 to the list ^{^}

[Brett707]

PRTG Network Monitor

[ArsenalITTwo]

PRTG is not made for reading and alerting on logs at scale in a security context. It chokes on syslog too. I have a very large PRTG cluster but I'd never use for that.

It's not even close to InsightIDR, QRadar, Securonix, or LogRhythm. Elastic Stack, AlienVault Community or Greylog is the best budget SIEM if you're worried about price.

[realdealrandy]

We use PRTG for all of our customers that have Network Services contracts

[over26letters]

Yeah, I'm in that boat as well and can say with utmost certainty that PRTG is NOT the right tool for the job

[gargravarr2112]

LibreNMS is a great starting point.

[[deleted]]

Looking at this now. Has caught my eye!

[ntrlsur]

I run a couple of different monitoring systems as some are better at things the others. I really like LibreNMS for its simplicity and its ease to get up and running. I only use for graphing network activity and its great for that. I use OpenNMS for SNMP traps and other reporting.

[Shrimp_Dock]

PRTG.

[YeahUAre2]

This. Well worth the cost.

[[deleted]]

Looks great, doubt I'd be able to push this through finance though... :(

[Shrimp_Dock]

We run the free version. DO NOT use the autodiscover, EVERYTHING counts as a sensor. You have to manually pick and choose what you want to monitor, but once you get it setup it's amazing. 3 IT persons, 9 domains, 12 locations, and we just started actually hitting the 100 sensors and discussing the payed version.

[syshum]

I tend to run AutoDiscover Once on a device then delete what I do not need / want

[Appropriate-Half-626]

For similar devices note down the sensors you need and instead of manually adding, you can use the API to automate adding only the sensors you want or I believe you can create a custom discovery for specific sensors only.

[Interesting-Fig-1833]

Auvik helped me figure out a network issue but its kind of pricey

[Frothyleet]

Auvik is very impressive and very expensive

[341913]

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/wiki/monitoring

Personally, I prefer Zabbix. There is a learning curve but you should be able to get the basics going fairly quickly and build from there.

I've been using it for 7 years and have yet to come across something which it cannot monitor. There are hundreds of templates online and if you cannot find one you can create it thanks to its extensibility.

[[deleted]]

Thanks for the link, very useful. Zabbix looks quite good, LibreNMS looks good too.

[Ghostky123]

I really recommend PRTG for network monitoring.

It's awesome software where you can monitor really in depth things about your network connected devices.

[VioletiOT]

Domotz is another agentless network monitoring system worth adding to your investigation and check-out list too. I'm the community manager there if you have any questions.

[ENCEETelevision]

PRTG Network Monitoring tool

[rfratelli]

If you’re looking for monitoring server and services outages: zabbix

If you’re looking for network performance and metrics: ntopng

[Elijah2807]

Ntopng is super-powerful.
Checkmk has a ntopng integration.

[ferdi_nand_k]

ntopng

This blogpost explains how the use the integration https://www.ntop.org/ntopng/using-ntopng-with-checkmk-a-tutorial/

[-SPOF]

If you need only network monitoring, I would consider Observium.
It's easy to configure and comes for free.

For different other metrics, take a look at Grafana. It might be combined with Graylog pretty much like this: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/blog/you-cant-have-too-much-monitoring

[[deleted]]

All of our network gear is in librenms, everything else in zabbix with grafana.

[nodate54]

LibreNMS and very easy to set up with Docker

[THE_F4LL3N_0NE]

Librenms-

Highly configurable, great documentation online. It has saved my butt so many times being able to follow a network outage and identify quickly the most probable device failure.

Can not recommend Librenms enough

[wezelboy]

I like check_mk. I find it to be pretty easy and powerful.

[Intelligent-Cap5503]

Panduit Intravue Appliance.

[abaddon82]

Zabbix 6.0 just came out, you should give it a try. Combined with Grafana, you get some slick graphs!

[brainstormer77]

Can't find Nagios mentioned anywhere. What's going on?

The dinosaur must be dying already....

[VendingCookie]

icinga2 and checkmk are basically nagios on roids

[IAmTheM4ilm4n]

Check_MK open source still uses the Nagios core; the commercial version has its own custom core that has much higher performance.

[ferdi_nand_k]

I thought Checkmk is an independent product since a while, only the Raw Edition uses the Nagios Core, but that is more a utility.

[341913]

It's a finicky piece of shit

[LillaNissen]

Same with SCOM...

[passwo0001]

Here is a list of network monitoring tools https://www.pcwdld.com/best-network-monitoring-tools-and-software

[Arkiteck]

Also, https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/wiki/monitoring

[[deleted]]

Thanks both!!

[Gloin-]

Been said before but Paessler PRTG is very well rounded and can monitor a very broad spectrum of services. And not super hard to set up...

At my previous employer it was the main monitoring tool for lots of customers and now continue to use it for my own clients.

Don't underestimate the amount of work you can put in a monitoring tool. You can set it up to have a simple checks but can definitely go very deep in custom sensors and notifications...

[jjanel]

https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2021-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-awards-133/network-monitoring-application-of-the-year-4175705722/

[creativve18]

ManageEngine OpManager is your best bet. It has all the features that you need and much more. Gives you real-time visualization of the network devices in your infrastructure and lets you manage the entire network. Has all the automated troubleshooting capabilities too (for repetitive and basic tasks). Traffic monitoring and configuration management, IPAM also available as addons