Low impact network monitoring

[pabloacastillo]

Hi there! im trying to build a new site/monitor for the country i live in (Paraguay) to monitor the quality of the ISPs down here.

This is just a couple of guys project, and im searching for a tool that will do network analisys with little to no impact on the ISP network.

I was thinking on doing PING to a lot of (static) ip's for each network and monitor the state of the connection. If the ping respond, then the network is fine. If one falls and the other not, its just a reboot. If all of them fall, its an ISP problem. Measure saturation, response time, etc.

We have a lots of drops down here (only one real provider of fiber, COPACO, witch is a state controled company) and that bring us some problems.

I was thinking on renting a linode VPS (20$ a month, not so bad) with debian to acomplish this.

I have little no none network experience, so any help will be helpfull.

I you guys have a better idea on how to acomplish this, that would be great also :)

Thanks, sorry for the n00bism

PS: sorry for the bad english, i learned it from lolcats and "Friends" :P

[manuel]

quite suprisingly, your English is much better than most who claim English is their primary language.

That said, a couple of suggestions: Nagios -- http://www.nagios.org/ or cacti -- http://www.cacti.net/ could work, BUT typically if you don't actually own or have permission to do this to the network, you could have some legal issues to deal with.

Good luck.

[VaKo]

Look at MRTG:

http://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg/

[Somken]

http://i35.tinypic.com/vo61z6.png

Linode has network monitoring tools on the dashboard so you don't have to install anything. You also have CPU and IO usage.

[pabloacastillo]

Hi there guys! thanks for the help. I will be looking into them.

I know Cacti and Nagios from my previus work at a local ISP, but didnt know if they will fit for the job. I will give them a good read.

What about shell commands? Wich one would you recommend besides ping and traceroute?

Thanks the help :)

[3w`Sparky]

http://www.paganini.net/index.cgi/angel/angel.html

this is a nice little app , i have modded the code slightly so the page plays a nice little bong if something bad is happening.

perl based very reliable with adjustable thresholds on what % is aloud to be lost before it 1) warns of peformance and 2) warns of real problems

std html page for monitoring

in windows i use pathping (xp pro) which will show jitter and allsorts of nice stuff , i just had a quick goolgle for a linux version and found this http://www.grendelchen.com/weblog/?p=151 but never used a linux version.

[catchyanow]

Use CMD - ping yoursitenamehere.com