LA_MERC_Captain_Obvious
January 20th, 2004, 08:30 PM
can any of the IT guys here give me some recomendations for a network monitoring tool?
I'm looking to do several things with it (and I know I may end up having to use several programs to acomplish all of it) -
LAN consist of roughly 45 nodes (workstations, printers, etc.)
WAN consist of multiple (17 right now and growing) locations connected through VPN site-to-site. each location having around 9 terminals (although I'm only concerned about 1 PC at each location, and that's our point of sale server)
we also have multiple (around 25-30) users connecting at various times through vpn client
our primary goal with a monitoring tool is to monitor the uptime and maybe potential problems with our 5 servers and the POS server at each location. Then if any problems occure we would need to be notified immediatly. and yeah I know WUG (what's up gold) is perfect for that, but that's about all it does and I don't think it will monitor across a VPN tunnel.
secondary goal is to monitor performance statistics of all the servers (at corp office and the locations). perhaps see services that are being started / stopped. mem and cpu usage.
some things we would like to include, but we know will end up costing us:
bandwidth monitoring (not bandwidth used, but what's availible. we think our ISP is holding out on us)
update patches and service packs on remote PC and servers.
I've seen quite a few tools out there, probably the best one I've seen so far is Systrack from http://www.lakesidesoftware.com/
that program has basically everything we could ever want in a metwork admin/monitor program except a good price (it's like $9k for the basic features on our network) you should check out a demo though, very impressive.
I'm testing out a couple products from GFI http://www.gfi.com/ right now that seem to do most of what we are looking for, and the price is pretty good.
I'm just wondering what others would suggest, and if anyone else has experience with the GFI products.
Max had mentioned something about Etherpeek, and NetRat looks pretty solid. sooo many choices, just want to make a god one that we will be happy with.
I'm looking to do several things with it (and I know I may end up having to use several programs to acomplish all of it) -
LAN consist of roughly 45 nodes (workstations, printers, etc.)
WAN consist of multiple (17 right now and growing) locations connected through VPN site-to-site. each location having around 9 terminals (although I'm only concerned about 1 PC at each location, and that's our point of sale server)
we also have multiple (around 25-30) users connecting at various times through vpn client
our primary goal with a monitoring tool is to monitor the uptime and maybe potential problems with our 5 servers and the POS server at each location. Then if any problems occure we would need to be notified immediatly. and yeah I know WUG (what's up gold) is perfect for that, but that's about all it does and I don't think it will monitor across a VPN tunnel.
secondary goal is to monitor performance statistics of all the servers (at corp office and the locations). perhaps see services that are being started / stopped. mem and cpu usage.
some things we would like to include, but we know will end up costing us:
bandwidth monitoring (not bandwidth used, but what's availible. we think our ISP is holding out on us)
update patches and service packs on remote PC and servers.
I've seen quite a few tools out there, probably the best one I've seen so far is Systrack from http://www.lakesidesoftware.com/
that program has basically everything we could ever want in a metwork admin/monitor program except a good price (it's like $9k for the basic features on our network) you should check out a demo though, very impressive.
I'm testing out a couple products from GFI http://www.gfi.com/ right now that seem to do most of what we are looking for, and the price is pretty good.
I'm just wondering what others would suggest, and if anyone else has experience with the GFI products.
Max had mentioned something about Etherpeek, and NetRat looks pretty solid. sooo many choices, just want to make a god one that we will be happy with.