Nis – a network monitoring tool

Abstract

Network monitoring is a difficult and demanding task that is a vital part of a Network Administrators job. If a network were to be down even for a small period of time productivity within a company would decline. In order to be proactive rather than reactive, administrators need to monitor traffic movement and performance throughout the network and verify that security breaches do not occur within the network. Network monitoring is a very important aspect of looking after and running any computer network with any significant number of nodes and used to help identify problems before users of that network are impacted and to highlight the specific fault or problem and where it is occurring for quick diagnosis and ensuring a fast transition from the stage of identifying there is a problem to working out where that problem lies and fixing the underlying cause. Systems Administrators and Network Administrators alike currently use a combination of various systems to meet their monitoring needs, ranging from graphing software to server monitoring software to network measurement software all in conjunction to provide enough visibility into a network to monitor it effectively when these needs should be met by one system. The project produced is a modular system that can be extended to handle the different types of monitoring a systems/network administrator might need to look after their network in a unified fashion. NiS successfully discovers the devices in the network automatically, maintains the database and logs of connected devices, scans the network for any changes, gets specific device parameters, graphically plots the network keeping its topology in mind and shows the bandwidth utilization of the devices. If any node is down, the system immediately updates itself and removes that specific system from the topology.