Network monitoring for Windows

Made to Measure

Article from ADMIN 04/2011

By Björn Bürstinghaus

We look at two tools for Windows network monitoring – PRTG Network Monitor and NetCrunch – that allow you to monitor servers at work or on the road.

The permanent availability of servers and the services they provide presents a challenge for any administrator. For this reason, network monitoring and the tools used to perform it play an important role in an administrator's ability to respond in case of an emergency.

PRTG

The PRTG Network Monitor [1], from the German company Paessler, can monitor any service, regardless of whether it is running on Windows or Linux, and can even monitor the availability of network appliances and determine the bandwidth consumption of network traffic. PRTG implements its monitoring features via Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), and, in the case of a compatible router (e.g., Cisco), NetFlow or sFlow.

In the current version, you don't need to license NetFlow sensors separately; instead, each WMI or SNMP query counts as a sensor license.

An appliance you need to monitor may deliver various data, such as the CPU load, the incoming and outgoing network traffic, or even product-specific data like the number of connections on a Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS). PRTG supports automatic detection, so all of the sensors available on a device are added automatically. To allow this to happen, administrators only need to know the username and password for Windows systems and the SNMP authentication credentials for Linux systems and network devices. Authentication can be configured globally or for each device.

PRTG integrates packet sniffing and thus is capable not only of monitoring sensors but also of discovering which application or IP address is generating large amounts of network traffic in the enterprise. This information can be determined by the network card of the monitoring server or via the monitoring port on a switch.

The PRTG developers have also taken virtualization

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