The Top 20 Free Network Monitoring and Analysis Tools for Sys Admins

1. Microsoft Network Monitor

Microsoft Network Monitor is a packet analyser that allows you to capture, view and analyse network traffic. This tool is handy for troubleshooting network problems and applications on the network. Main features include support for over 300 public and Microsoft proprietary protocols, simultaneous capture sessions, a Wireless Monitor Mode and sniffing of promiscuous mode traffic, amongst others.

2. Nagios

Nagios is a powerful network monitoring tool that helps you to ensure that your critical systems, applications and services are always up and running. It provides features such as alerting, event handling and reporting. The Nagios Core is the heart of the application that contains the core monitoring engine and a basic web UI. On top of the Nagios Core, you are able to implement plugins that will allow you to monitor services, applications, and metrics, a chosen frontend as well as add-ons for data visualisation, graphs, load distribution, and MySQL database support, amongst others.

3. BandwidthD

BandwidthD monitors TCP/IP network usage and displays the data it has gathered in the form of graphs and tables over different time periods. Each protocol (HTTP, UDP, ICMP, etc) is color-coded for easier reading. BandwidthD runs discretely as a background service.

4. EasyNetMonitor

EasyNetMonitor is a super lightweight tool for monitoring local and remote hosts to determine if they are alive or not. It is useful for monitoring critical servers from your desktop, allowing you to get immediate notification (via a balloon popup and/or log file) if a host does not respond to a periodic ping.

5. Capsa Free

Capsa Free is a network analyzer that allows you to monitor network traffic, troubleshoot network issues and analyze packets. Features include support for over 300 network protocols (including the ability to create and customize protocols), MSN and Yahoo Messenger filters, email monitor and auto-save, and customizable reports and dashboards.

6. Fiddler

Fiddler is a web debugging tool that captures HTTP traffic between chosen computers and the Internet. It allows you to analyze incoming and outgoing data to monitor and modify requests and responses before they hit the browser. Fiddler gives you extremely detailed information about HTTP traffic and can be used for testing the performance of your websites or security testing of your web applications (e.g. Fiddler can decrypt HTTPS traffic).

7. NetworkMiner

NetworkMiner captures network packets and then parses the data to extract files and images, helping you to reconstruct events that a user has taken on the network – it can also do this by parsing a pre-captured PCAP file. You can enter keywords which will be highlighted as network packets are being captured. NetworkMiner is classed as a Network Forensic Analysis Tool (NFAT) that can obtain information such as hostname, operating system and open ports from hosts.

 

8. Pandora FMS

Pandora FMS is a performance monitoring, network monitoring and availability management tool that keeps an eye on servers, applications and communications. It has an advanced event correlation system that allows you to create alerts based on events from different sources and notify administrators before an issue escalates.
 

9. Zenoss Core

Zenoss Core is a powerful open source IT monitoring platform that monitors applications, servers, storage, networking and virtualization to provide availability and performance statistics. It also has a high performance event handling system and an advanced notification system.

10. PRTG Network Monitor Freeware

PRTG Network Monitor monitors network availability and network usage using a variety of protocols including SNMP, Netflow and WMI. It is a powerful tool that offers an easy to use web-based interface and apps for iOS and Android. Amongst others, PRTG Network Monitor’s key features include:
(1) Comprehensive Network Monitoring which offers more than 170 sensor types for application monitoring, virtual server monitoring, SLA monitoring, QoS monitoring
(2) Flexible Alerting, including 9 different notification methods, status alerts, limit alerts, threshold alerts, conditional alerts, and alert scheduling
(3) In-Depth Reporting, including the ability to create reports in HTML/PDF format, scheduled reports, as well as pre-defined reports (e.g. Top 100 Ping Times) and report templates.

Top 10 Free System Troubleshooting Tools for SysAdmins

 

 1. Microsoft Fix It Solution Center

The Microsoft Fix It Solution Center is an online tool that helps you to quickly find and fix common system issues. Once you’ve entered the symptoms, you can either download an executable to automatically fix the issue or be directed to a relevant Microsoft Knowledgebase Article that explains what the cause and recommend workaround is.

2. Problem Steps Recorder

Hidden away in Windows 7 / Windows 2008 and above is a neat little utility called Problem Steps Recorder (psr.exe). The Problem Steps Recorder will record the step-by-step interactions that occur while the user replicates the problem, taking screenshots of every action. It then bundles all this into a report with detailed information and any relevant error logs.
This tool is great if you have a user in your environment who is experiencing an issue that you want to gain more information about and the steps they took to reproduce the problem, or if you want to create a report to send to a third party vendor as part of a support case.

3. Reliability Monitor

Windows Vista / 2008 and above include a tool called Reliability Monitor. This tool provides an overview of overall system stability and details about events that can impact reliability. The idea is to pinpoint any troublesome areas and take steps to improve system reliability based on what you learn (e.g. you might identify a trend in a certain application crashing when opening a certain file type)

4. WELT (Windows Error Lookup Tool)

When troubleshooting issues, you may come across Win32, HRESULT, NTSTATUS or STOP error codes which are likely to mean nothing to you or I. Using WELT you can find out what the error code means in plain English and what it relates to.

5. PowerShell Troubleshooting Packs

As I mentioned in my article entitled Windows PowerShell™: Essential Admin Scripts (Part 1) the PowerShell Troubleshooting Packs (bundled with Windows 7/2008 and above) can be really handy when troubleshooting system issues. As such, they are a collection of PowerShell scripts that you can use to diagnose different aspects of your servers, clients or network. Different packages are available to troubleshoot printers, networks, performance, power, Windows Update, etc.

6. WinAudit

As part of the troubleshooting process, it is helpful to know as much information as you can about the machine where the problem resides to assist in finding a solution more quickly. WinAudit scans your computer and gathers a whole raft of information about Installed Software, TCP/IP settings, Drives, Error Logs, etc.
Note: At the time of writing, the download link available from the developer’s website was broken. You can download the latest version of this software from a popular application download site like CNET.

7. Joeware Utilities

Joeware Utilities are a list of free troubleshooting and system information utilities aimed at making the life of an administrator easier. These tools are built by a system administrator from his own experience of not finding a tool out there that did the job he needed for whatever he was trying to solve. The tools available include anything from tools that dump user information from Active Directory, modify a user account’s expiration flag or perform TCP/IP port connection testing.

WhatsApp Messages Decryption using different tools.....

Step 2. Download and extract WhatsApp Xtract from XDA thread to a folder e.g. c:\whatsapp. Copy the database files you got in step1 to this folder.
Step 3. Install Python + pyCrypto library
You’ll need Python runtime and PyCrypto library to decipher the encrypted WhatApp messages.
Install ActivePython (Windows, Linux, Mac OSX). Hint: Use x86 version if you’re using 32-bit OS, else x64 if using 64bit windows.
When downloaded “run as administrator” install pyCrypto.bat. If you’ve any trouble install pyCrypto.
Step 4. For windows, drag & drop the database file on to “whatsapp_xtract_drag’n'drop_database(s)_here.bat”.
If you’re on Mac or Linux, use following commands:
For Android DB:
python whatsapp_xtract.py msgstore.db -w wa.db
OR (if wa.db is unavailable)
python whatsapp_xtract.py msgstore.db
OR (for crypted db)
python whatsapp_xtract.py msgstore.db.crypt
For iPhone DB: (-w option is ignored)
python whatsapp_xtract.py ChatStorage.sqlite
Once you run these, you’ll see the extracted messages into a html file