Lab – Researching Network Monitoring Software Objectives Part 1: Survey Your Understanding of Network Monitoring Part 2: Research Network Monitoring Tools Part 3: Select a Network Monitoring Tool Background / Scenario Network monitoring is needed for any sized network. Proactively monitoring the network infrastructure can assist network administrators with their day-to-day duties. The wide variety of networking tools available vary in cost, depending on the features, number of network locations and number of nodes supported. In this lab, you will conduct research on available network monitoring software. You will gather information on software products and features of those products. You will investigate one product in greater detail and list some of the key features available. Required Resources PC with Internet access Part 1: Survey Your Understanding of Network Monitoring Describe network monitoring as you understand it. Give an example of how it might be used in a production network. Network monitoring is the use of software to track and monitor system logs and its parameters. These include data trasmission, error rates,etc. An example of network monitoring is pinging a Voice Over the Internet Procotol or a mail server. Part 2: Research Network Monitoring Tools Step 1: Research and find three network monitoring tools. List the three tools that you found. Datadog Zabbix Incinga © 2017 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public. Page 1 of 2 Lab – Researching Network Monitoring Software Step 2: Complete the following form for the network monitoring tools selected. Vendor Product Name Linux Datadog Juniper Zabbix Share They work with different vendors Incinga Features Clean graphs of StatsD and other integrations. Slice and dice graphs and alerts by tags, roles, and more. Easy-to-use search for hosts, OpenVZ node monitoring through metrics, and tags. Zabbix. Alert notifications via e-mail and OpenVZ containers monitoring PagerDuty. through Zabbix. Full API access. rule-based configurations, REST API, alerting, performance monitoring, authentication, dashboards, security Part 3: Select a Network Monitoring Tool Step 1: Select one or more monitoring tools from your research. From your research, identify one or more tools you would choose for monitoring your network. List the tools and explain your reasons for choosing them, including specific features that you consider important. I would personally choose Incinga since it's the only monitoring tool which seems to make a point about security while keeping up with the system's performance. One of the specific features I liked was it authentication phase which in turn brings more security to the whole ordeal. Step 2: Investigate the PRTG network monitoring tool. Navigate to www.paessler.com/prtg. Give examples of some of the features that you found for PRTG in the space provided below. Monitoring Traffic, packets, applications, bandwidth, cloud services, databases, virtual environments,etc. For example , monitoring the data flow and logins of a database. It supports SNMP (all versions), Flow technologies (i.e. NetFlow, jFlow, sFlow), SSH, WMI, Ping, and SQL. Reflection Based on your research, what conclusions have you reached regarding network monitoring software? Monitoring software allows you to view or monitor the data flow in a network. Which could, or dare I say , will come in handy when trying to keep intruders out of a network or control the amount the of data that goes in and out of it which is something that most enterprises nowadays need to have knowledge of if they wish to maintain a safe environment in their networks. © 2017 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public. Page 2 of 2
