1

We are a medium sized company which has VPNs to more than 20 locations. We sometimes get complaints regarding access to the terminal server, and I would like to diagnose this as either a server issue or Internet connection issue.

What I am looking for is a utility that I can give an IP address to, and have it monitor/record whether or not that address is live. I am aware of munin, but I am looking for a more dedicated tool for this task, something that does not take a lot of time to get up and running.

EDIT: Using W2k3 terminal server. But I want to just monitor the VPN link between corp offices and the facility in question. Just something that pings on a determined schedule and records the result.

4 Answers4

0

*Assumes the terminal server is a unix/linux machine*

For unix/linux hosts iftop can filter traffic depending on network/subnet using the -F switch and then display connections from these addresses as they occur.

from the iftop man page :

-F net/mask

Specifies a network for traffic analysis. If specified, iftop will only include packets flowing in to or out of the given network, and packet direction is determined relative to the network boundary, rather than to the interface. You may specify mask as a dotted quad, such as /255.255.255.0, or as a single number specifying the number of bits set in the netmask, such as /24.

Or you could use a monitoring tool such as Cacti or Nagios, however these will require some setup work.

lyarwood
  • 111
  • 1
  • 3
0

I recommend wireshark if you are running in a trusted environment. It runs everywhere, is easy to install, has good support and is feature rich. The main downside is that it has suffered from security vulnerabilities, so if you use it, keep it up to date.

DaveParillo
  • 148
  • 5
  • Plus, don't forget that you can run wireshark as a non-root user if you're not doing a live capture. – MikeyB Sep 15 '09 at 23:03
0

Have to repeat what Lee said: nagios and cacti are IMHO the two most well-known open source monitoring solutions that can scale from basic ping checks of a few to full-resource monitoring of thousands of hosts. Both are easy-to-medium effort to set up (depending on environment and/or relevant experience), though something to keep in mind is that nagios does not easily implement pretty graphing, while cacti is all about graphs.

That said, your requirement to run on a Windows box AFAIK eliminates nagios from the running. cacti is a relatively easy-to-use tool, with some simple-to-deploy basic checks already supplied as part of the standard installation templates, so the only learning curve will be the particular layout, syntax and object dependencies - as is the case with any new tool of this sort.

Good luck:

http://www.cacti.net/download_cacti.php

Zayne S Halsall
  • 1,902
  • 15
  • 19
0

If you dont need to base this off a Windows system, I would recommend Nagios, then if you just want to quickly scan and see if hosts are up, you can install Nagvis to overlay the status data on an image. I personally have setup a display configuration similar to the one shown here to quickly identify regional VPN problems on our corporate network.

Greg Buehler
  • 1,030
  • 2
  • 10
  • 14