Joined: 07 Jun 2006 Posts: 1476 Location: New York, USA
Posted: Tue Sep 01, 2009 14:11 Post subject: Useful FREE tools for monitoring DD-WRT and your network
Cacti
Cacti is a complete network graphing solution designed to harness the power of RRDTool's data storage and graphing functionality. Cacti provides a fast poller, advanced graph templating, multiple data acquisition methods, and user management features out of the box. All of this is wrapped in an intuitive, easy to use interface that makes sense for LAN-sized installations up to complex networks with hundreds of devices.
If you are interested in graphing latency, etc grab this plugin for Cacti. It will allow you to graph latency (ping spikes) against router cpu and bandwidth
NetFlow Analyzer is a netflow monitoring tool which collects NetFlow packets or other supported flows exported from enterprise routers and switches, generating network traffic reports that help understand the nature of the network traffic and the bandwidth utilization, thus helpful in traffic analysis and bandwidth monitoring. NetFlow monitoring acheives a new level when a solution such as ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer is aligned to Cisco technologies such as NetFlow, NBAR and CBQoS.
NetFlow monitoring software is not only about monitoring the network traffic but also a tool to help network administrators to troubleshoot faster. The ability to drill down the interfaces and the seeing the traffic, application, source, destination, conversation etc, helps a network administrator to gain an indepth visibility into the network traffic. More use cases on troubleshooting.
Iperf is a commonly used network testing tool that can create TCP and UDP data streams and measure the throughput of a network that is carrying them. Iperf is a modern tool for network performance measurement written in C++.
Iperf allows the user to set various parameters that can be used for testing a network, or alternately for optimizing or tuning a network. Iperf has a client and server functionality, and can measure the throughput between the two ends, either unidirectonally or bi-directionally. It is open source software and runs on various platforms including Linux, Unix and Windows. It is supported by the National Laboratory for Applied Network Research
If you really want to get fancy - consider adding Nagios
Capabilities to monitor applications, services, operating systems, network protocols, system metrics and infrastructure components with a single tool
Powerful script APIs allow easy monitoring of in-house and custom applications, services, and systems
If you are interested in graphing latency, etc grab this plugin for Cacti. It will allow you to graph latency (ping spikes) against router cpu and bandwidth
I use Zabbix (http://www.zabbix.com) to monitor network devices.
Zabbix has a great webinterface and you can customize it a lot.
The only "problem" is that it "just" runs under Linux.
More details (copied from Wikipedia):
ZABBIX is a network management system application created by Alexei Vladishev. It is designed to monitor and track the status of various network services, servers, and other network hardware.
It uses MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite or Oracle to store data. Its backend is written in C and the web frontend is written in PHP. ZABBIX offers several monitoring options. Simple checks can verify the availability and responsiveness of standard services such as SMTP or HTTP without installing any software on the monitored host. A ZABBIX agent can also be installed on UNIX and Windows hosts to monitor statistics such as CPU load, network utilization, disk space, etc. As an alternative to installing an agent on hosts, ZABBIX includes support for monitoring via SNMP, TCP and ICMP checks, IPMI and custom parameters. ZABBIX supports a variety of real-time notification mechanisms, including Jabber.
Released under the terms of version 2 of the GNU General Public License, ZABBIX is free software.
If you just search network tools (pingers, port-searchers, ...) then I think Net-Tools (http://users.telenet.be/ahmadi/nettools.htm) are great, because within this package you have almost everything you need (and a lot more). _________________ 1 x TP-Link WDR-4300 v1.1 (primary router running OpenWRT Attitude Adjustment)
1 x TP-Link WDR-3600 v1.4 (backup/testing router running latest OpenWRT bleeding edge)
Last edited by wjwj on Wed Sep 02, 2009 8:31; edited 3 times in total
I use Zabbix (http://www.zabbix.com) to monitor network devices.
Zabbix has a great webinterface and you can customize it a lot.
The only "problem" is that it "just" runs under Linux.
If you just search network tools (pingers, port-searchers, ...) then I think Net-Tools (http://users.telenet.be/ahmadi/nettools.htm) are great, because within this package you have almost everything you need (and a lot more).
If you are interested in graphing latency, etc grab this plugin for Cacti. It will allow you to graph latency (ping spikes) against router cpu and bandwidth
If you are interested in graphing latency, etc grab this plugin for Cacti. It will allow you to graph latency (ping spikes) against router cpu and bandwidth
Maybe someone might want to add this to the WIKI??
Would be better for the Wiki if we had suggestion for multiple operating systems.
Darkshadow
All the tools I mentioned (with the exception of Nagios) work for Linux as well as Windows.
wjwj
The Cacti tool - and others like MRTG give you history. This is the most useful feature - looking back over time hours, days, weeks, months.
The piung plotters dont store data and give only a snapshot - maybe last 24 hours. While useful - the ping plugin for Cacti is much more useful. Cacti comes with port scans (templates and discovery) as well as a discovery engine. Nettools in my opinion are very basic - while not an issue - not what I was trying to bring out in the thread - tools to give some substance to many of the performance related issues reported on the builds.
When I see a difference in memory utilization or cpu or bandwidth between builds I can quantify it both in data dumps and graphs. I can relate ping spikes to CPU or bandwidth and rule in or out the dd-wrt as contributing to a spike.
Netflow is a HUGE eye opener as to what is going on with your PC's and the network. It gives you per IP utilization as well as what they are doing - not just URL's...
Posted: Tue Sep 01, 2009 21:44 Post subject: Re: Useful FREE tools for monitoring DD-WRT and your network
dellsweig wrote:
...Nettools in my opinion are very basic - while not an issue - not what I was trying to bring out in the thread - tools to give some substance to many of the performance related issues reported on the builds.
...
I still say this is great stuff for a WIKI
Absolutely true. I personally would recommend Zabbix for monitoring devices and storing historic values, despite there are comparable tools. Nettools is just for quick diagnostic and playing around.
Joined: 22 Jun 2008 Posts: 2440 Location: Am now Dark_Shadow
Posted: Tue Sep 01, 2009 23:14 Post subject:
OK, if you update your first post with a little more detail (As I don't have the first clue about those proggy's) I will add to the Wiki. _________________ The New Me
I'll add this to note 18 of the peacock as well. _________________ SIG:
I'm trying to teach you to fish, not give you a fish. If you just want a fish, wait for a fisherman who hands them out. I'm more of a fishing instructor.
LOM: "If you show that you have not bothered to read the forum announcements or to follow the advices in them then the level of help available for you will drop substantially, also known as Murrkf's law.."