Additionally, immediate custom fixes may not be available unless you spend time developing and maintaining them yourself. The second consideration is security, which may become an issue, depending on the tool you select and your enterprise’s security guidelines. Missing features may have to be built with the help of community support or an in-house IT team. Open-source monitoring solutions often require a significant investment in time and resources. As the saying goes, “Open-source is only free if your time is worthless.” Open-source choices are good and can even match commercial tools, but you should know that using open-source monitoring requires a high level of involvement with the tool, which may not perfectly suit your needs. Below, we will share some of our favorites with you. Because many organizations need their network to be up and functioning to generate revenue, having the right set of tools to monitor and manage the one you so lovingly created is critical.īut how do you find the best network monitoring tools when there are hundreds of commercial products, freeware tools, and open-source software to choose from? While the debate about free versus commercial goes on, there are tried and tested, free network monitoring tools that many network admins swear by. To build a network, you start with an architecture, draw the design, and analyze and choose the hardware that meets your requirements. But now that time has passed, the landscape has changed, and we think it’s worthwhile to review those old choices and possibly add a few new ones. And honestly, those reviews have stood the test of time. Definitely worth a serious look if you’re running a serious network.Way back in 2015, we reviewed the must-have top free networking tools. There is a lot of embedded help but the system could really do with a lot more.īottom line: Groundwork Monitor Community Edition (particularly in its virtual appliance form) is a powerful, flexible and comprehensive network monitoring and management solution. The result is that the Groundwork Monitor user interface is not the best organized or easiest to understand. Now for the downside: As I wrote, Groundwork Monitor provides an enormous range of services but being built from multiple independent projects it is consequently very complex. On the other hand, being wrapped up in a ready-to-run virtual appliance at least makes the complexity of installation a nonissue and is a great starting point for a custom installation. But be warned the learning curve for Groundwork Monitor is significant. Groundwork Monitor Community Edition really can do more or less everything you need in a network monitoring and management environment and can be used to manage systems right up to enterprise-class networks. Using the default administrator account, you can log in create users, roles and groups play with the example devices already set up remove them run the network discovery process add devices set up alerts generate reports and so on. Voilà!Īccess to the Groundwork Monitor system itself is through a Web browser, and while you probably won’t need to log in to the guest operating system in the virtual machine, should you decide to do so and go looking for the root password let me save you an hour of research: It is ‘opensource’ (I couldn’t find this gem in the documentation anywhere – what would we do without Google?). Once you have downloaded the GZIP’ed tarball and unpacked it you simply open the virtual machine with any of the VMware systems (VMware Server, VMware Workstation or the VMware Player) and start it. debs for Debian and Ubuntu distros, as well as a bootable ISO image based on Centos available for download, it’s the virtual appliance for VMware that is the simplest and fastest way to evaluate Groundwork Monitor. While the Community Edition is available as RPMs for SUSE and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. What this mélange produces is a very powerful and a complex set of tools that supports role-based management, device monitoring, event detection, reporting with escalation, and mapping, with device discovery and multiplatform implementation along with both agent and agentless client support. Nagios also supports its own plug-ins along with the ability to integrate any command line program to work as an application to extend Nagios. The actual management system is, as I mentioned, based on Nagios 2.10 (not the latest release of Nagios - Version 3.03 was released on June 25 this year) along with Nmap, Sendpage, PHP, Apache, MySQL, Cacti, dojo, fping, Ganglia, NeDi, Net SNMP, NRPE, NSCA, Ntop, Perl, PHP, RRDtool, SNMPTT and SYSLOGNG. Anyway, Groundwork Monitor 5.2.1 is built on Centos Release 5 and licensed under the GNU Public License (GPL v2).
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