network monitoring

[LA_MERC_Captain_Obvious]

can any of the IT guys here give me some recomendations for a network monitoring tool?

I'm looking to do several things with it (and I know I may end up having to use several programs to acomplish all of it) -
LAN consist of roughly 45 nodes (workstations, printers, etc.)
WAN consist of multiple (17 right now and growing) locations connected through VPN site-to-site. each location having around 9 terminals (although I'm only concerned about 1 PC at each location, and that's our point of sale server)
we also have multiple (around 25-30) users connecting at various times through vpn client

our primary goal with a monitoring tool is to monitor the uptime and maybe potential problems with our 5 servers and the POS server at each location. Then if any problems occure we would need to be notified immediatly. and yeah I know WUG (what's up gold) is perfect for that, but that's about all it does and I don't think it will monitor across a VPN tunnel.

secondary goal is to monitor performance statistics of all the servers (at corp office and the locations). perhaps see services that are being started / stopped. mem and cpu usage.

some things we would like to include, but we know will end up costing us:
bandwidth monitoring (not bandwidth used, but what's availible. we think our ISP is holding out on us)
update patches and service packs on remote PC and servers.

I've seen quite a few tools out there, probably the best one I've seen so far is Systrack from http://www.lakesidesoftware.com/
that program has basically everything we could ever want in a metwork admin/monitor program except a good price (it's like $9k for the basic features on our network) you should check out a demo though, very impressive.
I'm testing out a couple products from GFI http://www.gfi.com/ right now that seem to do most of what we are looking for, and the price is pretty good.
I'm just wondering what others would suggest, and if anyone else has experience with the GFI products.
Max had mentioned something about Etherpeek, and NetRat looks pretty solid. sooo many choices, just want to make a god one that we will be happy with.

[LA_MERC_M@lACHi]

I know we us WUG for monitoring uptime/downtime of servers and their services, network hardware, websites, etc. We also use MRTG (www.mrtg.org) for bandwidth monitoring on all network connections. This can also be ported over to monitor basic server performance stats. The neat thing about MRTG is that it is FREE.

My .02 cents

[eNdOfBeGinNinG]

sweet..thnx henry.. i needed a free program too

[LA_MERC_M@lACHi]

Something else you might could look at!

http://www.somix.com/products/index.php

[LA_MERC_Captain_Obvious]

that webNM program is pretty sweet. I will definitly check it out.
Malachi, do you have any experience with MRTG other than viewing reports? I have it installed (and PERL installed too) but I can't seem to get past creating the config file.

[LA_MERC_MadMAX]

You may want to check this out too for protocol analysis...
http://www.ethereal.com/ Free as well.

[LA_MERC_Yankee]

We use IPSwitch's What's Up Gold. It r0x3rs your b0x3rs.


What's Up Gold (http://www.ipswitch.com/products/network-management.html)

[LA_MERC_T4rg3T]

roXet recently setup MRTG, might want to ask him .. probably still fresh in his mind

This is what we use
http://www.nagios.org/

We also use this in combination with MRTG
http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/rrdtool/

Also, roXet mentioned this instead of MRTG when I was speaking to him
http://www.raxnet.net/products/cacti/

[LA_MERC_Captain_Obvious]

Thanks guys. that's definitly a few things to check out. the MRTG setup is kicking my butt though. I'm going to keep trying to get it installed. (just like I keep rushing Toby with my mp5 even though he keeps awping me) Maybe I can get with roXet on it.