Open Source Network Monitoring System

Description

There is another good open source software to test our network performance. Iperf. This software written by a team from The National Laboratory for Applied Network Research (NLANR). The old homepage for Iperf is at here but they said it is moved to sourceforge. But if you go to the old website you will find a lot of useful links also.

The concept is the same as NetPerf. Using client and server. Iperf is able to analyze the latency/response time, the jitter (latency variation), the datagram loss and of course the network troughput.

Quick Howto Read the rest of this entry »

Tired of pointing someone, because something goes wrong with the network? And after an investigation, you know that some configurations changed. Everybody just be quiet.

Well, you have a solution for that. You will notice the changes quickly and if the new configuration bring a lot of problem, you can rollback to the previous configuration easily.

This solution is brought by rancid, created by shrubbery. This Software will manage all your configuration changing including the hardware itself. Rancid will do the following to collect the configuration changes:

• login to each device – define the device in the router table (router.db)
• run various commands to get the information that will be saved
• cook the output; re-format, remove oscillating or incrementing data
• email any differences (sample) from the previous collection to a mail list
• finally commit those changes to the revision control system

For the revision control system, you can choose between CVS and Subversion. Myself use CVS and it runs well for almost two years in my previous company where i worked.

Currently you can backup the device from Cisco routers, Juniper routers, Catalyst switches, Foundry switches, Redback NASs, ADC EZT3 muxes, MRTd (and thus likely IRRd), Alteon switches, and HP Procurve switches. Also some other device is added. You can get the full list from its website or joining the mailing list. Go get it. It is hot and it is open source.

One more thing, there is another product called ziptie. Almost the same function as rancid, but it has a better interface. It also run on windows. And there is commercial support available.

Sometimes we want to know how our network is if there are a lot of user using it. Will be there any congestion? How soon? Where is the bottle neck?

Using netperf, which was developed by HP engineer – Rick Jones, at least we can simulate it. Netperf using client server methods. And we can use it either in linux/unix or windows. For windows version you can download in netperf website and compile it or you can download the binary version here.

After unpack it. You will have two files (for windows version, i haven’t tried for other version). netclient.exe and netserver.exe. Let say, you have a webserver. You want to simulate how is the network performance from webserver to the client. you will run the netserver.exe in the web server ( from what i read, it is possible if the server is in linux, and then you run the linux version of netserver).

Next, in your pc you will run netclient.exe like this:

netclient.exe -H webserver_ip_or_hostname

The output will be like this (depend on your test method actually):

netclient.exe -H 10.0.8.81
TCP STREAM TEST to 10.0.8.81
Recv   Send    Send
Socket Socket  Message  Elapsed
Size   Size    Size     Time     Throughput
bytes  bytes   bytes    secs.    10^6bits/sec

8192   8192   8192    10.00       3.39

There are a lot of other options you can find it here. Netperf support UDP, TCP and SCTP test. Also support for IPv4 and IPv6 traffic. And we can test using bulk file transfer or we want to measure request/response performance.  You can read the full manual at here. Happy testing. Tell me the result.