30 Day Free Trial

Public Domain or Free Network Monitoring Tools

  • Monitoring Infrastructures (also see Comparison of Some Internet Active E2E Measurement Infrastructures)
    • Cheops is an Open Source Network User Interface designed to unify your network utilities.
    • JetMon is a client-server link monitoring tool for NOC operations, written in Java. The server pings a list of network devices, reporting the state to the clients.
    • Ganglia is a scalable distributed monitoring system for high-performance computing systems such as clusters and Grids.
    • Mon is a general-purpose resource monitoring system, which can be used to monitor network service availability, server problems, environmental conditions such as the temperature in a room, or any number of things.
    • NetMeter This application provides an integrated graphical interface for a set of tools that allows the measurement of QoS parameters over IPv4 and IPv6 networks. Network Performance Meter (netmeter) is an Tcl/Tk application which tries to solve these tasks in a flexible and modular way.
    • Network Performance Advisor is a single application which integrates the measuring, analyzing, and displaying of network performance statistics.
    • OSSMON is a web-based monitoring package based on OSSWEB application framework. It supports SNMP monitoring as well as specific services like POP3, SMTP, Ping.
    • PingER End-to-end active measurement using ping to monitor end-to-end performance of Internet links.
    • SCAMPI SCAMPI is a platform for passive monitoring. It can use several different hardware monitoring adapters (SCAMPI adapters developed in the project, DAG cards produced by Endace and regular NIC cards). It provides MAPI (Monitoring API) as a high-level abstraction of passive monitoring for easy creation of portable monitoring applications.
    • Scriptroute is a flexible network measurement and debugging system. Measurements are expressed as scripts that run as an ordinary user, and a priviledged daemon schedules and manages the packet exchange. The goal is to allow any user to connect to any server and execute any safe network measurement.
    • Simple Infrastructure Capacity Monitor (SICMD) is a tool to monitor, graph and alert the capacity of computing devices. SICM runs on a Windows or Linux device on your network, 24 hours every day. The recorded data is accessed via a user friendly menu-driven web browser. E-mail alerts are raised if a user determined number of queries fail.
    • Website Monitoring is a free website monitoring application released under the GPL that provides an uptime monitoring tool.
    • Wombat monitors the availability and operation of websites. When your website goes down or produces a defineable error, WOMbot will automatically notify you via SMS and Email.
  • Packet capture tools. (see also commercial capture tools) Before using these tools on your site you should check with your network security people.
    • Analyzer is a fully configurable analyzer program. It was developed in Win32 environment. It can be used with both Windows 95/98 and Windows NT/2000 platforms. It is composed by three parts: a graphical interface, an analysis engine and a capture program.
    • Argus the network Audit Record Generation and Utilization System. The Argus Open Project is focused on developing network activity audit strategies that can do real work for the network architect, administrator and network user. It is a Unix based Real Time Flow Monitor designed to track and report on the status and performance of all network transactions seen in a data network traffic stream.
    • Bro intrusion detection system contains a number of protocol analyzers that can munch on tcpdump traces (or live traffic, of course) and extract high-level application events from the reassembled TCP/UDP streams.
    • Crypto-PAn is a cyrptography-based sanitization tool for network trace owners to anonymize the IP addresses in their traces in a prefix-preserving manner.
    • flstats is program for extracting flow statistics from trace files created using the -w argument to tcpdump.
    • NetraMet and other realtime flow meters designed for Internet accounting including NetraMet (a traffic meter), NeMac (a combined manager & meter_reader) and NIFTY (a traffic flow analyzer).
    • PasTmon is a passive network application response time monitor utilising packet capture (via libpcap), tracking sessions maintaining transaction state and collecting metrics of server/network response times, segment size negotiation and TCP window size advertisements.
    • Plab is a software platform for packet capture and analysis. It is capable to extract, either from live traffic or from file traces, Inter Packet Times (IPT) and Packet Sizes (PS) inside conversations between couples of hosts. Plab runs under Linux and FreeBSD. It tries to use as few processing resources as possible and it is capable of analyzing traffic traces of hundreds millions packets associated to millions of conversations.
    • Snoop is similar to tcpdump and is bundled with the Sun/Solaris Unix operating system.
    • Snuffle is a measurement tool for capturing the protocol messages, internal protocol states and to measure implementation performance on networking nodes. Snuffle consists of a set of modules placed in the kernel, device driver and user space. Currently measuring probes for UDP, IP and IEEE 802.11b MAC are implemented.
    • TansuTCP (TT) is a TCP trace utility which listens on a local port and then forwards tcp packets to another server. You can see and save binary / text data to a file or you can load binary data from a file.
    • Tcpdpriv is a program for eliminating confidential information from packets collected on a network interface (or, from trace files created using the -w argument to tcpdump).
    • TCPurify is a packet sniffer/capture program similar to tcpdump, but with much reduced functionality. What sets TCPurify apart from other, similar programs is its focus on privacy. TCPurify is designed from the ground up to protect the privacy of users on the sniffed network as much as possible.
    • TCPshow is a Unix based program that parses the output file of TCPdump into human readable text.
    • trafshow continuously displays information regarding packet traffic on the configured network interface that match the boolean expression.
    • Tstat TCP statistic and analysis tool (Unix/Linux based) - allows collecting network performance indexes from passive traffic analysis (i.e. packet traces), at both network (IP) layer, and at transport (TCP/UDP/RTP/RTCP) layer. It can be used to persistently monitor links, thanks to the integration with the RRD database.
    • WinPcap is an architecture for packet capture and network analysis for the Win32 platforms, based on the model of BPF and libpcap for UNIX. See also libcap for windows and libpcap for Unix.

More >>>