Network Health and Status/Monitoring

[Zambezi]

Hello everyone,

This is my first post on this forum but after comparing it to others this forum seems to be more inclusive and more active than many others so I decided to give it a shot.

I have done some research online however I am hoping to get a solution from someone who has a similar issue. I am looking for a tool or set of tools (preferably open source or cheap – although this could change if a pricier tool is very good) that map out an existing network. I know that Visio has this capability however it ends up being a giant Star where one device is central and ALL other devices are directly connected. My network has a few subnets and a few switches with multiple rooms with PCs/Printers connected (think classroom environment) that I would like to see represented well in tiered form.


What I would like the software to do:
- Map the network – I will be manually writing down PC/Printer names to be sure it is accurate but I would like the majority of the work done via network discovery
- Determine Up/Down Status
- Determine if PCs need to be updated
- Display Computer Name

I am not opposed to running Linux for this tool/tool suite and my network is very dynamic in that PCs are frequently moved from room to room. I don’t mind updating PC movements manually however if it were done automatically that would be a huge plus. I am running (with the exception of servers and a few VMs) a pure Windows (XP, 2K3, 7) environment so that should help narrow things down. So far I have only tried free tools with the most recent being Nagios (installed on Ubuntu 10.4) but it was a complete fail. It was properly installed from source code however it did not do what I wanted it to do and with the Linux/Windows VM testing environment it failed to discover anything outside of the Host OS.

Hopefully someone else has this same issue and has a solution but regardless – thanks in advance for all suggestions.


--lZaml--