Network Monitoring

[Matt Graham]

From: "der.hans" <PLUGd at LuftHans.com>
> Nathan England wrote:
>> I'm looking for a program or something that can monitor my network as a
>> whole and tell me which machines are consuming all my bandwidth. All
>> the tools I've tried only tell me what the machine itself is consuming,
> Look at nagios and hobbit.

Maybe it's just me, but I'd go with ganglia before nagios if you wanted to
monitor network usage.  We're using both ganglia and nagios here, and they
serve fundamentally different needs, really.  Nagios is there to periodically
ask "Is (stuff) within (acceptable parameters)?  If not, mail people at
(contact group) and take (other appropriate action)."  Ganglia is there to
poll nodes periodically, collect data, display that data in a pretty web
frontend, and retain that data for a year in RRD files.

However, if you want per-machine bandwidth stats, you WILL have to install a
monitoring service like Ganglia's gmond on each machine.  Unless you have all
the machines plugged into a smart switch, or the gateway is a smart box.  If
either of those conditions hold true, you can write something or use existing
utilities on that switch/box to get some stats.  Ganglia would probably be
easier/more flexible.  Are there any 'Doze boxes in this network?  There's
probably some sort of gmond workalike for 'Doze now, but I've only ever used
it on Unix-like OSes.

-- 
Matt G / Dances With Crows
The Crow202 Blog:  http://crow202.org/wordpress/
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see