Usually, commercial and enterprise grade network routers (such as Cisco, Juniper, HPE etc) run on their own proprietary operating system (OS) software which runs only on the specific vendor’s hardware devices. However, the Open Source community has developed some great Router OS software that can power commodity hardware such as x86 computers or regular SOHO […]

As network engineers, having insights about how our network performs can save us from a lot of headaches. That’s where software tools for network diagnostics are useful for every networking professional. Pingplotter is a network diagnostic software utility used to monitor packet loss, latency, jitter etc in data packets along network paths. This tool lets […]

Cacti is a popular open source networking tool that is web based, and it is used both for network monitoring and graphing. In my work environment we use Cacti extensively to mainly monitor bandwidth on interfaces of switches etc. It is a complex tool to learn but very powerful.  With Cacti you can poll services, […]

As network engineers and administrators, we mostly focus on managing and configuring hardware devices such as routers, switches, firewalls, load balancers etc. We rarely deal with software management tools which are equally important in a corporate network. Without knowing the health, performance, availability and quality of your network is like running with closed eyes. Network […]

Network simulation tools allow students (e.g people studying for Cisco Exams) to easily learn the core concepts of computer networking and TCP/IP in general. Even professionals could benefit from these tools by simulating network environments and get an idea of how a network will work before actual implementation. Moreover, system administrators could use them as […]

Firewall management is one of the most challenging aspects of enterprise network security. The main issue is that many enterprise networks are complex, they contain a blend of many different vendors and technologies and this makes it time-consuming and difficult to maintain and support. The big hardware firewall vendors (like Cisco, Checkpoint, Fortinet, Palo Alto […]

Syslog is the De Facto standard used in Networks for sending/receiving Log messages from IT systems, network devices, hosts etc. The Syslog protocol runs over port UDP 514 and is based on the IETF RFC 5424 standard. Almost all network connected devices (routers, switches, firewalls, Unix systems, Windows systems etc) support the Syslog protocol for […]

As network engineers we are usually assigned various tasks related to the life-cycle of networks, starting from the initial design, procurement, installation of network equipment and then management and monitoring of existing networks. In the latter phase (management and monitoring of networks) we are constantly faced with major or minor problems such as links going […]

For businesses, the task of network and IT infrastructure monitoring remains highly important. A company cannot afford to ignore the security and performance of its network and IT resources. Nagios remains one of the most popular solutions for IT infrastructure monitoring today. An entire suite of software allows businesses to take control and have visibility […]

In my enterprise work environment, our corporate private and public network spans across many buildings and locations and uses thousands of private IP addresses (in the range specified by RFC1918) and hundreds of public IPs as well. How do we handle the management of such a huge address space? The secret is an IPAM (IP […]

A network sniffer, or packet sniffer, is a specialized software (or even a hardware device) that listens in over a network and records the IP packets of data that travel through it. Many network administrators use these tools to determine the efficiency of a network, to troubleshoot communication problems, to identify common network bottlenecks etc. […]

Log management and log analysis tools play a vital role in maintaining healthy and secure systems and network infrastructure. Logs provide “visibility” into what is going on in your network and systems, both from the operational perspective but also from the security perspective as well. Comprehensive logging involves the recording of statuses and events from […]

Nagios, Zabbix and Icinga are three of the most popular software tools for network monitoring and management. These tools have a plethora of features and characteristics but their core purpose is to provide visibility into your network and IT systems by monitoring the health, performance, utilization etc of your critical infrastructure components. All three are […]