Computer networks are being the target of many attacks in addition to abuse 
from internal users making network and systems engineers life harder.
Over the years I tried many open source network monitoring solutions but none could satisfy all the needs and requirements of my network environment.
PRTG is a commercial network monitoring software that is powerful and easy to use. I downloaded it and installed a free trial for 30 days. The setup was very easy and the configuration guru helped me auto-discover the devices on the network and it was running in almost no time.
PRTG comes with an easy-to-use web interface with point-and-click configuration. You can easily share data from it with non-technical colleagues and customers, including via live graphs and custom reports. This will let you plan for network expansion, see what applications are using most of your connection, and make sure that no one is hogging the entire network just to torrent videos.
PRTG can collect data for almost anything of interest on your network. It supports multiple protocols for collecting this data:
- SNMP and WMI
- Packet Sniffing
- NetFlow, jFlow, and sFlow
PRTG Network Monitor includes more than 190 sensor types for all common network services, including HTTP, SMTP/POP3 (email), FTP, etc. It can alert you to outages before your users even notice them, including via email, SMS, or pager.
You can access PRTG from a Windows desktop application or through a web-browser running on any platform. If you want to check on your network remotely, you can use its native iPhone/iPad apps or Android apps on your phone or tablet.
PRTG has a simple licensing model. You pay one price for this version of the software, based on how many sensors you need (i.e. how many things you want to track on your network), regardless of technology used. All licenses include all sensor types, an unlimited number of remote probes and Failover clustering (1 master node and 1 failover node).
Give it a try! It will take only a couple of minutes to setup and you can test it for free for 30 days.