Packet Rancher

Here is an aggregation of links to tools I’ve found valuable as a network engineer.  Check them out and if you like  a tool, support the project be it with donations or your time.  Almost everything I’ll list here is most likely an open source project but if there are some commercial products we’ve used that are exceptional enough to make the grade, they’ll be on here.

Cacti is an incredibly useful web based tool for graphing just about anything you can imagine.  Also checkout the plugin architecture that makes Cacti highly extensible.

Nagios is the de facto standard in open source monitoring with a great user community.  There’s nothing you can’t monitor with Nagios and using the Cacti plugin architecture, can be integrated easily with Cacti.

Wireshark is a packet sniffer/protocol analyzer that is an essential tool for troubleshooting.

GNS3 has become essential to trying Cisco based network configurations before deployment.  It’s also a wonderful tool for those testing for career boosting certifications.  Definitely the way to go if you don’t have Cisco gear to test with.

NFDUMP provides incredibly useful tools to collect and manage NetFlow data.

NFSEN is a front end to NFDUMP that displays the Netflow data in graphs and has a plugin architecture to create custom reports.

MTR, an acronym for “Matt’s Trace Route” named by it’s original author Matt Kimball, is an excellent tool when trying to track down network path issues.  It performs a traceroute then repeatedly pings each hop in the path.