[ NNSquad ] Re: Catalog of Measurement Tools

[Andrew Burnette <acb@acb.net>]

Lauren, et al.

Good old fashioned nlanr.net has a great suite of tools for measurement
and monitoring.

I've also found the following *very* useful in tracing down all sorts of
trends and events in network performance. (I recently finished a job on
just that subject for a major backbone, but I prefer to stick to the
simple, free, and open tools for the most part, as you can mold them
into exactly what you need):

1- Bro http://www.bro-ids.org/ cool IDS that can manipulate ACL's with
some work.
2- iperf (test tool)
3- ntop (profiling of RRD files)
4- pfflowd (and flowd variants) (i personally prefer BSD based
firewalls...just my pref, good tool nonetheless)
5- bandwidthd  (great for measurement and trending of traffic matrices)
6- darkstat (cool meta data gathering tool for packet flows)
7- snort (of course)
8- big sister network monitor (hmmm, see number one )
9- nagios.  well, it's a bit broader in perspective, but does often a
better job than solutions costing a "lot" more.


There are numerous additional tools which cross over into the "security"
arena which also provide additional and very good info.

Often a "tail -f log" on a firewall will show a good bit of data on a
small user/network base. You'll need correlation tools for larger
networks (due to sheer information overload).

Cheers,
andy burnette


Lauren Weinstein wrote:
> I'd like to start gathering a "catalog" of existing Internet
> measurement tools (including tools already published, and those that
> are "private" but available) as a foundation for an initial set of
> recommended software that folks can use to begin exploring the
> capabilities and conditions of their own Internet connectivity.
> 
> If you have suggestions, please send them to the list (comments from
> the group regarding these packages would be very useful) along with
> some details about what functions they perform, how easy they are to
> use (suitable for consumers or pros?), and any other relevant
> information (free?  shareware?  commercial?  OS types supported?)
> 
> It's time to get some initial metrics churning.  Thanks.
> 
> --Lauren--
> NNSquad Moderator
>