Windows Networking: Three Top NMS Picks

[Planet]

As we covered in our overview of SNMP and Windows, SNMP is used to monitor the availability of network devices ranging from routers to switches to servers or client devices. Ideally, it is better to identify a network failure yourself before your boss comes knocking to your door. Along with a number of other methods, SNMP is implemented by network management software to check the status of network devices.

Read the rest of this article (http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/netos/article.php/3771981) by Jabez Gan (http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/feedback.php/http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/netos/article.php/3771981) here (http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/netos/article.php/3771981), then come back here to discuss it.

[davis]

At my old job we used SNMP along with various other tools (Cacti if i recall the name properly) to do real-time network status reports.

It was just a simplistic website, but you could check out 7 days worth of statistics for any of our remote locations, current status, bandwidth usage, etc...

[ua549]

I use MRTG (http://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg/) (free) for network monitoring as well as monitoring server resources such as memory utilization and I/O activity. Any counters in Windows or any MIB OID can be monitored. The whole shebang can then be presented in any format to a browser. MRTG runs on Windows or *nix.

Here (http://www.ua549.com/mrtg/) is a sample monitoring a W2k3 perfmon log on one of my home boxes.