Best Network Monitoring Tools & Techniques

NOC Overview -

A network operations center, or "NOC," is a centralized location where IT technicians directly support remote management and monitoring software efforts. NOC equipment is widely used in managed IT services and is a formidable service delivery controller for many MSPs.

These technical teams closely monitor the terminals they control and manage, solve problems independently, and take preventive measures to prevent many issues from occurring. NOC teams are also heavily involved in high-level security actions and disaster recovery and backup (BDR) efforts, ensuring 24x7x365 availability to MSP customers.

Noc Tools –

Open-source options are good, but you should know that the use of open-source monitoring requires a high level of participation in the tool. Open source requires a significant investment of time and resources to learn, install, configure and use. Funds can be created using community support or an internal IT team. The second consideration is security, which becomes a problem if your company applies strict safety rules. Immediate custom corrections may not be available unless it takes a long time to develop. Or, critical security issues may not be discovered in the audit process.

Here are the top five NOC Tools that you need to know about -

·         ICINGA2

·         NAGIOS CORE

·         CACTI

·         ZABBIX

·         NTOP

ICINGA2 -

Icinga 2 is an open-source monitoring system that checks the availability of your network resources, informs users of faults and generates performance data for reporting.

Scalable and extensible, Icinga 2 can monitor large and complex environments across multiple sites.

If you already have NAGIOS clients in your systems, the migration is effortless. You can continue using the same NAGIOS clients as Nagios NRPE, NSClient, etc.

Many companies have been using NAGIOS for years and have now migrated to Icinga2.

NAGIOS CORE –

Nagios® is one of the most popular and widely used free network monitoring tools. Network administrators love Nagios because it does it all. What you do not have can be built or built by the Nagios community.

There are two versions of Nagios. Nagios Core is free and open-source, and Nagios XI is a trading tool based on Nagios Core, but with additional features. Nagios is popular because of its active development community and its support for external plugins. You can create and use external add-ons as executable or Perl® files and shell scripts to monitor and collect metrics for each hardware and software used on a network.

There are add-ons that provide a more straightforward and more efficient graphical user interface, address many Core® limitations, and support features such as automatic discovery, extended graphics, notification scaling, and more. Etc. Nagios may be impressive for startups and companies that do not have enough IT support staff, but it offers good monitoring powers. For support, users can always get help from the Nagios community or opt for a Nagios Enterprise support package. Quality NOC can provide support for the installation, configuration, and development of new features to verify software and hardware.

If you have time to invest in learning and mastering this tool, Nagios Core offers excellent network monitoring capabilities.

CACTI –

Cacti® is a network monitoring tool that allows you to collect data from virtually any network element, including routing and switching systems, firewalls, load balancers, and servers, and put them in the form of robust graphics. If you have a device, it is possible that the active community of Cacti developers has created a monitoring model for it.

Cacti support SNMP search, which covers a wide range of network devices. You can also extend the features of Cacti to use scripts, queries or commands for data collection and save it as a template for other devices for similar data sets. Cacti harness the power of RRDTool, an open-source graphics and data logging system that stores consulted data in the database and created graphs from stored data sets. RRDTool data consolidation allows you to store your data forever and is limited only by the size of your storage. Cacti rely on RRDTool to generate any chart for any data set. Cacti is the standard used by many commercial and open-source tools. Plants also allow you to add multiple users and grant access to a NOC device.

Many add-ons, scripts, and templates can be used in this community. We especially liked the device support and graphic features.

ZABBIX -

Zabbix is ​​probably the most used open-source network monitoring tool after Nagios.

Complex to configure, Zabbix® comes with a clean and straightforward graphical user interface that makes it easy to manage when you get used to it.

Zabbix supports agent-free monitoring using technologies such as SNMP, ICMP, Telnet, SSH, etc., as well as agent-based control for all distributions of the Linux®, Windows®, and Solaris® operating system. It is compatible with several databases, including MySQL®, PostgreSQL ™, SQLite, Oracle® and IBM® DB2®. Zabbix VMware® features, which are considered the best function.

NTOP –

Ntop, which is now ntopng (ng for the next generation), is a traffic probe that uses libpcap (for packet capture) to signal network traffic.

You can install ntopng on a server with multiple interfaces and use port doubling or a network tap to enable ntopng with network data packets for analysis. ntopng can analyze traffic even at 10G speeds; report on IP addresses, volume, and bytes for each transaction; classify traffic based on IP address, port, and protocol; Generate reports to use see the best speakers, and even report AS information. This level of traffic analysis helps you make informed decisions about capacity planning and QoS design, as well as finding users and applications that are hogging bandwidth on your network. ntopng has a commercial version called ntopng pro, which comes with some extra features, but the open-source version is good enough to quickly get information about traffic behavior. Ntop can also be integrated with external monitoring applications such as Nagios to alert and provide data for monitoring.