Knowing what is happening on the network they manage is essential to most network administrators. This is why network monitoring tools were created. They let managers keep a watchful eye on the network while also providing much-needed assistance when troubleshooting issues. And with the ever-growing popularity of Linux in the data center, we thought we’d have a look a some of the very best Linux network monitoring tools.
As we often do, we’ll begin by defining network monitoring. We’ll explain what it is and what benefits it can bring. We’ll follow-up by introducing the Simple Network Management Protocol. After all, it is the underlying technology used by most network monitoring tools. We’ll also explain in some detail how SNMP is used to calculate network bandwidth usage while keeping our explanation as non-technical as possible. Next, we’ll briefly talk about Linux and talk about the advantages of using it as a network monitoring platform. This will bring us to the core of our discussion the actual Linux network monitoring tools. We’ll review a handful of the best tools we could find that will run on Linux.
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