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We are looking for a open-source network traffic monitor for Windows Server 2003 / 2008. We need to monitor network up and network down traffic so we can scale our VPS (Virtual Private Server) usage correctly. Most VPS servers limit the total bandwidth per month so we want to make sure that we do exceed our limits. Any thoughts on software would be appreciated. Thanks in advance "don't for get to vote" |
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Windows 200x Server has quite a lot of built-in functionality to monitor and manage resource usage. Netstat is the premier way to monitor your network on Windows and should come built in on server boxes (if not you can download it from Microsoft.com iirc). It's an arcane command-line-utility equivalent in some ways to the similarly-named utility in Linux. There's MRTG, which you may already have if you are using some sort of web admin panel. Here's info on installing it on a Windows box: http://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg/doc/mrtg-nt-guide.en.html You may also be able to get Munin running in Windows. Merjin Bellekcom, the guy who wrote HijackThis, built an ugly-but-highly-functional system monitor called Uptime4 that can pull a lot of info from netstat. It's not open-source and he doesn't maintain it, but if you have Remote Desktop access you might give it a shot; find it at his website, http://www.merijn.nu/programs.php. If you're not looking for a great deal of power there are a lot of desktop widgets that will show bandwidth usage, and of course taskman can show you too. Other than that... You can try installing cygwin if you would like to use linux open-source utils, some of them may run in that environment. Good luck. |
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The best way to monitor bandwidth usage is to do it within your network devices and not the computer. If you are not dealing with a really large scale network, you can build a small computer and install a extra network card and use it as a router, then disable all of it's firewall abilities then just keep it inline to monitor bandwidth. There are many free open source OS that are dedicated to just being a router and may be cheaper than a enterprise level software program, and it also scales better for small networks. |
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If you use CISCO networking or equivalent, suggest using Netflow to monitor. NetFlow Analyzer is a good utility, but not free past 2 flows. MRTG will monitor various aspects via SNMP, and a good Open Source tool for MRTG is Cacti (and will work under Linux and Windows). |
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Depends on what you want it to be open source for. Is it so you can add features? |
