There are templates for monitoring a wide range of equipment, from Linux and Windows servers to Cisco routers and switches, basically anything that communicates on SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol). If any device or service returns numeric data, then they can most likely be integrated into Cacti. Cacti is the modern flagship of open source network graphing software and takes the principles of MRTG to a whole new level.įrom disk usage to power supply fan speed, if it can be tracked, Cacti will be able to display it and make this data easily accessible.Ĭacti is a free program included in the LAMP suite of server software that provides a standardized software platform for plotting virtually any statistical data. Now RRDTool is used in a huge number of open source tools. So MRTG gave birth to RRDTool, a set of utilities for working with RRD (Round-robin Database, ring database), which allows you to store, process and graphically display dynamic information such as network traffic, processor load, temperature, and so on. Back in the 1990s, its author Tobias Oetiker saw fit to write a simple plotting tool using the ring database originally used to display bandwidth router in local network. Cactiįirst there was MRTG (Multi Router Traffic Grapher) - a program for organizing a network monitoring service and measuring data over time. From discovering devices, monitoring network equipment and servers, to identifying network trends, graphing monitoring results, and even backing up switch and router configurations, these seven free utilities are likely to surprise you.

Since good and free is always more tempting than good and expensive, here is a list of open source programs that prove their worth every day in networks of any size. Lucky for you, there are a lot of good programs available on the market, both commercial and open source, that can do your network monitoring. If you don't know exactly what your network and servers are doing every second of the day, you're like a pilot flying blind. For the world of system administration, this sacred text should sound like this: Visibility, Visibility and once again Visibility. The mantra of the real estate world is Location, Location, Location.

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