This is the 56th article in the Spotlight on IT series. If you'd be interested in writing an article on the subject of backup, security, storage, virtualization, mobile, networking, wireless, DNS or MSPs for the series PM Eric to get started.
Every day there are numerous SpiceHeads asking about how to monitor and trend bandwidth utilization and traffic — with free or paid tools. This is useful information. To help these and others like them select the right tools to achieve their goals in a better and easier way, I’ve compiled a list of my favorite tools.
This is, of course, my opinion. I may be wrong, but I believe these tools can help every IT guy. Here are my top five personal favorite solutions.
- Untangle Bandwidth Control
Cost: 14-day free trial / $270 for 1 year for 1-10 PCs
What is does: Bandwidth Control allows administrators to control and visualize network usage at a fine-grained level. Features include the ability to assign data transfer quotas, guarantee bandwidth, punish unauthorized usage, and prioritize and de-prioritize sites.
- Cacti
Cost: Free
What is does: Cacti is a complete RRDTool-based graphing solution. It stores all of the necessary information to create graphs and populate them with data in a MySQL database. The frontend is completely PHP driven. Along with being able to maintain Graphs, Data Sources, and Round Robin Archives in a database, Cacti handles the data gathering. There is also SNMP support for those used to creating traffic graphs with MRTG.
- Splunk
Cost: Download for free. Enterprise features available for 60 days — index up to 500 MB of data a day. After 60 days, convert to a perpetual Free license or purchase an Enterprise license to continue using expanded functionality.
What is does: Splunk collects, indexes and harnesses the machine data generated by your IT infrastructure. Troubleshoot, investigate security incidents, monitor end-to-end infrastructure to avoid service degradation or outages and more.
- OpManager
Cost: The Free Edition supports 10 devices, and a single user and features basic monitoring functionality. Various editions are available. Pricing is based on number of devices. A 30-day free trial is available for all editions.
What it does: OpManager is network monitoring software that offers fault and performance management functionality across IT resources such as routers, WAN links, switches, firewalls, VoIP call paths, physical servers, virtual servers, domain controllers and more.
- BandwidthD
Cost: Free
What is does: BandwidthD tracks usage of TCP/IP network subnets and builds HTML files with graphs to display utilization. Charts are built by individual IP.
For more details about these tools and many others, visit my full how-to article:
Bandwidth Monitoring Free & Paid Tools Software Details. (Credit for this idea goes to
Jay6111, whose great how-to post
Resolving scan errors, Unknowns, and no open ports in inventory inspired my list.)
By using these tools, you can do advanced user monitoring, protection against data leaks, inventory of hardware and software, and proactive network monitoring. Some have great reports and graphs that help you visualize your network. Some of the tools have various miscellaneous utilities like SNMP tester, sFlow Tester, WMI Tester, etc.
The right tools for the right jobA little bit about my company: We’ve been associated with the auto parts manufacturing industry for the last four decades. We have 288 workstations within the country; various branches are connected with point-to-point connectivity and several users are connected by VPN. We have central physical servers and data centers installed in the head office with one VM. We are using various Linksys switches, Cisco routers and hardware firewalls, so it is easy to monitor all these by using the tools I’ve listed.
We have hosted email servers. We’re using a UK-based ERP software (we’ll move on to SAP in future). We have VOIP implemented within all connected branches. Lots of users enter their data online, so we monitor the issues and resolve them by using these tools successfully.
Out of my entire list of tools, right now we use Untangle, Manage Engine and Cacti the most. We also like
PRTG Network Monitor a lot. Its bandwidth control option, site-prioritizing option and quotas options are good. We also use Manage Engine OpManager for performance monitoring of one virtual server in our other branch. Right now it’s good for one VM, but I think it will be good for more than one — its a new branch and because of the growing network, we’ll have to make another VM on that =)
OpManager offers three editions. Essential Edition is designed for the small and medium size enterprises. Enterprise Edition is, obviously, for large enterprises. Free edition only supports 10 devices.
We using the free version of Splunk as it is sufficient as for our needs. I’ve seen its paid version at another company. It has features like monitoring and alerting, access controls, distributed support and enterprise support options, which are not included in the free version.
We’re testing
Nagios now and we hope that to implement it as per our organization needs and budget.
Free or paid?There is a bit of difference between what you can get for free and pay. Sometimes we have seen that the features of the paid (commercial) tools did not included in the free tools so people prefer free tools unless it is necessary to buy paid tool. Some organizations do because of their budget others do because of its options, so as you can see that I included both free and paid tools details in my how-to.
The big advantage of the paid tools is the support, which you can get at one call and which is sometimes not available when you use free tools. On the other hand, you can get updates for your paid software that can resolve its bugs or can offer you value added options. Both can be useful, but it depends on your needs.
Last but not least, if you have any suggestions of other valuable tools, I’d be happy to add them to my list. It’s my pleasure to share my thoughts in this Spotlight on IT Series.
What free or paid tools do you use to monitor and trend bandwidth utilization and traffic? Do you have any suggestions that aren’t included on my list?
care of Muhammad Bilal
