Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Network Monitoring

One of the most important tasks of a network engineer or network manager is to manage his / her network. And one of the important items in network management is network monitoring. Through network monitoring, a network engineer will be able to know how his network perform - whether it is over utilized or under utilized. Based on this information, s/he will be able to plan for the network s/he manage.

I used to use MRTG in managing my network. As long as the network nodes - Cisco router, Cisco switch, server is having SNMP service enabled, it should be able to be monitored by MRTG. Not only MRTG can show us how much incoming and outgoing traffic through each of the network interface of a network node, we also can use an external program to gather data which should be monitored via MRTG.

I have been using MRTG in monitoring my server system load, number of user account generated and so on.

In short, it is up to your creativity in maximizing this tool in helping you manage your network systems.

By the way, MRTG is available at http://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg. It can be installed in Windows platform or Unix systems.

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