NMS Hardware and Software suggestions

[sbhelms]

Hi all, First post so pardon me if I have chosen the wrong place to plant this post.

I am heading into the waters of network management tools. At my office I am working with a mix of hardware. I am interested in upgrading my home network to equipment that would allow me to use tools such as SNMP and something along the lines of Netflow to analyze what's on the wire. The idea is to reinforce and learn concepts that could be leveraged at work. I have dabbled with wireshark and am trying to look at some tools for work such as IpSwitch's What's UP Gold Premium (which includes a flow monitor) or Solar Winds.

My question is what prosumer hardware (wireless AP, router, switches) would you recommend for a home network that doubles as a learning lab? Also, is there a "learning friendly" software package I could install on a home server that would be similar to a What's UP Gold or SolarWinds? Mainly I am looking for monitoring applications on the wire, utilization and practice setting alerts based on SNMP trap results.

Suggestions? Thanks and feel free to point me in the correct direction if I should have posted this elsewhere.

 

[theonlyski]

Look into Nagios http://nagioscore.demos.nagios.com/ It is a free version of the same back end that we run in a medium sized corporate network (medium being ~5000 users).

I believe there is a free version of Scrutinizer that allows you to look at flows real time, but doesn't allow you to store the information.

As far as equipment, we're a Cisco shop so most of us with labs at home have Cisco gear, I say try to get your hands on what you use at work or press them to allow you to build a dev network at work. While many of the principles of networking are the same, there are vastly different ways of doing it on different vendor equipment. You can learn a lot about the basics with other brands but to really get in the nuts and bolts of how it works, you should really look at that gear in specific.