What's a good tool to monitor network activity

Question

I'm operating a neighbourhood WIFI network in a rural environment.

Now I'm looking fo a monitoring tool to run on a server (Windows or Linux) which would track bandwidth, uptime (clients as well as internet connection), etc... Most of this information is exposed via SNMP by my routers and access points, so SNMP support is required.

Additional features should be:

• Graphical data representation
• free license

So what's the best choice for me?

Edit These are the tools mentioned so far:

• MRTG
• Munin
• Nagios
• Zenoss Core
• ntop
• cacti
• ZABBIX

Answer 1

Also consider CactiEZ on a VM or small server, it is a baremetal CentOS 6 based system.

Answer 2

Not sure if this fits your usage but a lot of web hosting provider uses Nagios for network monitoring

Answer 3

I had the same question last week and tried several options.

For basic snmp graphing needs, cacti is great, but graphing apache, mysql, etc. is a bit too hard I think.

ntop is also a nice tool, but has a different usecase than the other ones in your list.

You should look at Zenoss. The Core version is FOSS, userfriendly, and very powerful. I had no need for the Enterprise version, but your needs may differ. It does graphing, monitoring and alerting of all the basic stats, but download some ZenPacks and you can easily add Apache, MySQL or many other stats. All configuration can be done via the GUI. The interface is clear and responsive and allows for easy management of very large networks.

In short, I'm glad I never spent much time on Nagios, because I believe Zenoss is the best option available.

Answer 4

Zenoss Core is free and open source. It keeps RRD graphs (like other monitoring tools mentioned here). To monitor parameters other than basic network bandwidth (and up state), the switch or router SNMP definitions and MIBs should be available as a ZenPack. Runs on a Linux (virtual?) server. Uses Google Maps to display link status.

Answer 5

MRTG is probably the easiest to setup. If your router has SNMP (as you mention), to setup it's a single command:

cfgmaker --output=mrtg_myrouter.cfg public@1.2.3.4

MRTG is good for high-bandwidth routers and the likes. It's not great for other data (it can be coerced into graphing most things, but it's a little unintuitive to setup)

For monitoring other stuff I like Munin. I would describe it again, but I posted an answer a while ago here (about graphing disc-usage).

Munin can of course graph network usage, and easily pull data via SNMP (in fact it's the recommended setup for grabbing data from Windows-based servers - run a SNMP daemon on the Windows machine, and have Munin connect to this). The graphs are also prettier than MRG, I would say (clearly the most important factor..)

There's an example installation of MRTG here, and Munin here

Answer 6

IMHO, Cacti is easiest to install and use.

Zabbix is interesting, but harder to use.

And here is a very comprehensive list of all network monitoring tools.