Network Monitoring

[am85]

I'm looking around for a good, preferably well-known, Networking Monitoring Software application that will run on Windows Vista and XP. I found Nagios but it appears it only runs on UNIX/Linux (could I be wrong?). Anything that monitors network traffic and connections would be fine.

Any recommendations? Thanks in advance.

[mojo]

What exactly do you want to monitor? Nagios isn't specifically for monitoring network traffic and connections, it's for monitoring the health of all your computers. I actually had a great time setting it up at work a few weeks ago and now it's monitoring over 800 services on 220 hosts for us. If this is for work or you have lots of machines, it'd be worth it for you to set up a physical or virtual machine to run linux and nagios on. Nagios has no problems monitoring windows machines, it just runs itself on linux/unix. If you're just talking about monitoring the network connections of one computer, there's tons of tiny little programs out there.

[am85]

I'd be using the software for my home network, mainly as training incase I get to use it on the job sometime. I do want to setup a UNIX (Solaris 10) machine sometime. Perhaps I could just run Nagios off that machine. In doing so, it will monitor all the machines on my network?

[mojo]

It will monitor all the machines on your network if you set it up to do so. It's not something you just install and flip a switch and everything works. You have to put a client on each machine for detailed monitoring, and you have to configure an entry for each machine in nagios. Also, I wouldn't recommend messing with getting Solaris up and running just to put nagios on it, especially since Sun is no more and who knows what Oracle will do with Solaris now. Just try something easy, like ubuntu server or debian to get it up and running.