Network Flow Analysis

Network Management Tools

These are some pretty heady claims for a network management system, especially if you are familiar with existing network management tools. Many people are justifiably proud of their extensive network management systems. Let's take a look at some of the popular free network management tools and see how they fit together and how flow analysis can improve on them.

MRTG, Cricket, and Cacti

MRTG, Cricket, and Cacti use SNMP to generate graphs of network traffic across device interfaces and store the results in a fixed-size database. Knowing how much traffic crosses your network at any time is an absolute necessity, and I make heavy use of such tools myself. The fixed-size databases mean that you don't need to worry about database ...