What's a good tool to monitor network activity

Question

I'm operating a neighbourhood WIFI network in a rural environment.

Now I'm looking fo a monitoring tool to run on a server (Windows or Linux) which would track bandwidth, uptime (clients as well as internet connection), etc... Most of this information is exposed via SNMP by my routers and access points, so SNMP support is required.

Additional features should be:

• Graphical data representation
• free license

So what's the best choice for me?

Edit These are the tools mentioned so far:

• MRTG
• Munin
• Nagios
• Zenoss Core
• ntop
• cacti
• ZABBIX

Answer 1

MRTG is probably the easiest to setup. If your router has SNMP (as you mention), to setup it's a single command:

cfgmaker --output=mrtg_myrouter.cfg [email protected]

MRTG is good for high-bandwidth routers and the likes. It's not great for other data (it can be coerced into graphing most things, but it's a little unintuitive to setup)

For monitoring other stuff I like Munin. I would describe it again, but I posted an answer a while ago here (about graphing disc-usage).

Munin can of course graph network usage, and easily pull data via SNMP (in fact it's the recommended setup for grabbing data from Windows-based servers - run a SNMP daemon on the Windows machine, and have Munin connect to this). The graphs are also prettier than MRG, I would say (clearly the most important factor..)

There's an example installation of MRTG here, and Munin here