Top 10 Network Monitoring And Analysis Tools

Sometimes, as a network administrator you need easy to use tools. Here are a number of them you can use to analyze traffic, monitor protocols, ports, services and devices on a network without spending a single cent.

Network Monitoring And Analysis Tools

Microsoft network monitor

This packet analyzer helps in analyzing, viewing and capturing network traffic. The Network Monitoring tool helps those engaged in troubleshooting network complications and tools on a network.

It is also loaded with a number of features worth talking about, such as offering support for more than 300 Microsoft and public, proprietary protocols, wireless monitor mode, simultaneous sessions capture, among other tools.

Nagios

This network monitoring application is very powerful and ensures your critical services, tools and systems are running without issues.

Reporting, event handling and alerting features are provided. Through the Nagios Core within the tool, there is a core monitor and an essential web UI. Through the Nagios Core, the administrator can implement a number of plugins for easier monitoring of metrics, applications and services, data visualization add-ons, MySQL database support, load distribution, graphs among others.

BandwidthD

Through this tool, IP/TCP network usage is easily monitored. All the gathered data are also displayed as tables and graphs over a period of time.

To make the reading much easier, every protocol such as ICMP, UDP, and HTTP among others are color-coded. The tool runs invisibly as a background service.

EasyNetMonitor

Sometimes you might want to monitor both remote and local hosts perhaps to ascertain if they are active or dead; this super lightweight application comes in handy.

It helps to monitor critical servers, right from the desktop and immediately sends a notification through a log file or balloon pop up in case the host fails to respond to an occasional ping.

Capsa Free

This is also a network analytic tool, giving an administrator the chance to monitor the network traffic, analyze packets and troubleshoot network problems.

Apart from supporting, customizing and creating more than 300 protocols on a network, this tool also offers Yahoo Messenger and MSN filters, dashboards, customizable reports and email auto-save and monitor.

Fiddler

Through this tool, web debugging is very easy. It captures the HTTP traffic among selected PCs and the web. The tool also allows you to analyze outgoing and incoming data for modification and monitor of responses and requests prior to allowing them to the browser.

It is also a tool providing critically detailed data on HTTP traffic and handy when you want to test how your website is performing or testing the security of a web application. For instance, Fiddler is capable of decrypting HTTP traffic.

NetworkMiner

Sometimes this tool is classed as an NFAT (Network Forensic Analysis Tool) because it is capable of obtaining information from hosts such as open ports, operating system and hostname.

Nonetheless, its basic functions include capturing network packets before parsing the information to extract images and files to aid the administrator in reconstructing events that might have been taken from the network. The tool can also do this through parsing a PCAP file, pre-captured.

Zenoss Core

This tool is a handy open source IT monitoring tool noted for its powerful monitor of virtualization, networking, storage, servers and applications to provide performance and availability statistics.