Other popular free network monitoring software

This page contains a comparison of alternative network monitoring tools to pmGraph. We hope that this is a fair and objective comparison, but please let us know if you disagree, or to suggest other tools for comparison.

• ntop measures total traffic (volume and packets) generated or received by each host on the network, broken down by network protocol and IP protocol (FTP, HTTP, NFS, etc.); current, average and peak bandwidth usage; currently active TCP sessions; and total amount of UDP traffic sorted by port. It does not maintain history across restarts, or allow more detailed measurement such as analysis of remote hosts or traffic flow by time. It captures traffic using Netflow or Pcap.

• BandwidthD graphs traffic by host over time, and produces summary statistics by protocol. It does not maintain history across restarts, or allow more detailed measurements such as analysis of remote hosts or by port number. It cannot display all the individual hosts on a single graph to show comparative and total bandwidth usage. It only captures traffic using Pcap.

• NfSen records traffic by host over time, and produces graphs and reports. It stores data in RRD databases and a custom database format that allows more detailed querying (drilling down). The custom database is not indexed, which makes such queries slow. The RRD databases discard old data automatically to maintain a constant fixed size, which may suit your needs. The NfSen user interface cannot display all the individual hosts on a single graph to show comparative and total bandwidth usage. It does support creating alerts based on conditions, and custom analysis plugins. It only captures traffic using Netflow, so a Netflow sensor is also required.

• Argus and NeTraMet both record traffic flows (source and destination host and port) over time, in custom databases. NeTraMet provides more configuration of detail levels. The database is not optimised for performance and can become quite slow, however it is very space efficient. They do not have graphical user interfaces, and only capture traffic using Pcap. It’s also now possible to store Argus traffic records in a SQL database with rasqlinsert (new feature).

In our view, pmacct fills a unique niche where detailed traffic records are acquired from a variety of sources (pcap, Netflow or sFlow), and stored in a portable, versatile and searchable format (in this case a SQL database), for as long as the administrator desires. However, pmacct did not have a simple graphical user interface, and this is what pmGraph provides.

Summarising the features of each product in a table: