Hi,
I'm new here but I already have a quick question.
What are the best diagnostic tools available to network operators today?
Thanks for any info,
Jane
Well, i dunno about everyone else, but i start screaming when my ICQ flower
turns orange and starts spinning.
</saracstic jerk>
Date: Thu, 06 Jun 2002 09:50:48 -0400
From: Pawlukiewicz Jane
What are the best diagnostic tools available to network
operators today?
NANOG posts. 
Why do you think I joined this group? very smart man.
Jane
"E.B. Dreger" wrote:
Date: Thu, 06 Jun 2002 13:42:41 -0400
From: Pawlukiewicz Jane
Why do you think I joined this group? very smart man.
In all seriousness, one has the basics like traceroute, ping,
route servers, looking glasses, et cetera. However, those tools
only give a view from a certain point or along a path... they
provide a limited cross-section of a complex N-dimensional beast.
Bill was right: Sean Donelan's posts are very handy. And I was
only halfway being a smart-aleck... if one deduces that there
just _has_ to be something anomalous, posting to NANOG is an
amusingly low-tech "distributed layer-9" diagnostic.
Note that I'm assuming you refer to internetwork diagnostics. If
you seek intranetwork diagnostics, one has SNMP and other tools.
I've seen the usual list of HP Openview/Ciscoworks (bad name)/Big Brother.
I've used Netsaint at 2 installations. http://www.netsaint.org.
Only problem is they are changing their name to nagios due to a request
from the SAINT people. The latest development version of netsaint is at
http://www.nagios.org
Really good program and you can usually set it up pretty quick.
With the plugins you can have it monitor just about anything you want.
I know it supports monitoring:
smtp,pop,nntp,ping,mysql,radius,ldap,disks,ntp,oracle,load,ircd,swap...and
on and on.
Don't let the beta in the version fool you. It's not just beta quality.
Gerald
P.S. Long time listener first time poster.