I'm currently looking for a solution that would allow me to easily graph traffic on a network. Basically what I'm looking for is anything that could actively provide graphs/charts/colors etc. for our management to see "whats going on" in the network. I'm looking for something that provides a lot of eye candy, because of course, management loves that kind of thing.
If it's some appliance, I have no problem sticking it somewhere in the network to let traffic pass through it. The basic idea here is to actively identify, measure and graph the type of traffic and "wow" management with fancy pictures (even if they don't understand it).
Does anyone know if there exists an easy solution to provide live traffic data? We don't really want to hire any extra developers to create a web interface, so I'm hoping something is already out there that doesn't require much work/setup/programming. I could more than likely get the company to spend a lot of money and management would definitely buy anything (so no price is too high here). Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Best Answer
The already mentioned Zabbix, Cacti, Munin and ntop are excellent for general network traffic graphing.
But if your management is not very technical and you have some web servers around, logstalgia provides you lot of eye candy. Just tell them you are debugging your web server load issues or whatever. :-)
You can use it in real time like this:
Above would connect to your web server and run
logstalgialocally at your workstation, so no additional load or installed components at your server are needed.