Network Monitoring Software

Hello and Happy New Year.

I support a network with some pretty dated equipment like a Cisco 2900XL
switch (unmanaged). That is the newest piece of LAN/WAN hardware. <sigh>

I am looking for some recommendations on [free] software that I can use
to monitor my office-to-office subnet traffic and bandwidth utilization
as there are time of the day when user's cannot get to important files
from the [single] Windows 2003 Server Standard SP2 we have in the
domain. Any graphical statistics generation capabilities as opposed to
filling an Excel spreadsheet would be a plus.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions and tips.

I would recommend using MRTG to graph utilization of switches/routers,
Perfmon on your servers and Wireshark to see what exactly is going on.

Since you mentioned a 2900 in particular, it'd be worth looking into
SPAN (or port monitoring) capabilities that might be available and using
that with Wireshark to see what is going through particular interfaces.


Richard Giagnacovo


M wrote:
> Hello and Happy New Year.
>
> I support a network with some pretty dated equipment like a Cisco 2900XL
> switch (unmanaged). That is the newest piece of LAN/WAN hardware. <sigh>
>
> I am looking for some recommendations on [free] software that I can use
> to monitor my office-to-office subnet traffic and bandwidth utilization
> as there are time of the day when user's cannot get to important files
> from the [single] Windows 2003 Server Standard SP2 we have in the
> domain. Any graphical statistics generation capabilities as opposed to
> filling an Excel spreadsheet would be a plus.
>
> Thanks in advance for any suggestions and tips.