I had been using Sonicwall routers… Then a friend of mine jokingly mention to me that … “Friends don’t let friends use Sonicwall” lol, so he convinced me to use Mikrotik for our VPN’s at our sites and I am VERY VERY impressed with the Granular control of all traffic with the Queue Tree and Mangle our network software has never worked so well. With Sonicwall I had Analyzer that monitored my firewall’s and the users on the network, where they went on the web and which devices that were hogging the bandwidth. If anyone would be so kind as to direct me to a software that would come the closest to mimicking or surpassing the Analyzer software that Sonicwall had I would really appreciate it. It would be great if it was free but I am not opposed to paying for it or donating either if I can get approval for it.. What have you folks found to be most useful? Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance!
Mikrotik have own net flow protocol implementation called “traffic flow”. you can use some third-party software to work with traffic flow. such as ntop (open source and free). Also there is awesome but commercial software called Manageengine Netlow Analyzer.
Also you can use “The Dude” to monitor your network and view link bandwidth information in real-time (with help of snmp).
Great Thanks, I’ll give ntop a go and see how it goes. I checked into Manageengine and they charge per year which is a bummer. Thanks again for your quick response!
Thank You for the suggestion and the link, I will look into that also since it would be nice to have a live compliment to ntop, my main problem usually is that someone at one of my locations will email me about a problem that happened an hour ago and I have to go back and see what caused it. So I can hopefully preempt the issue next time. For those issues I have to be able to look back and see what had happened. Thankfully I haven’t had those issues of slowness since I installed the Mikrotik routers but I want to be prepared if it does happen. I appreciated everyone’s help!
DUDE can help you in this regard. If any device goes down, you can setup EMAIL or SMS alert so you can be informed immediately. For example, You can also dude to take automatic action for specific failure, e.g: At a remote site, I have configured DUDE to monitor an local SQUID Server. This squid server have strange problem (dueto some unsupported hardware) that some times its squid service get stucked and need to be manually restarted. So I have configured dude to keep monitoring squid server service after every 5 minutes and if it found squid service not running, it can remote ssh to squid and restart the service. there are other several interesting customized things you can do with the dude.
Its also better if you setup some sort of MRTG graphing for remote servers, like there CPU / MEMORY / HDD usage, UPTIME, network status. SMOKEPING is also good for latency monitoring. MRTG really helps in having 5 mnts/ hourly, monthly or yearly stats of your hosts. If you need any help in the monitoring section, do let me know
What have you folks found to be most useful? Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance!