Free network monitoring tools software for linux

Skipole Network Monitor project is a simple network monitor with built in web server.

It allows the user to input host IP addresses, it then pings these hosts every five minutes and displays their status via a built-in web server, on port 8000.

So calling http://your_pc_address:8000 will display pages showing green, yellow or red host or group symbols.

Each host is pinged four times every five minutes, and symbols are displayed as:

green : if three or four pings are successfull
yellow : if only one or two are successfull
red : if all four fail

As well as hosts, group symbols are displayed, and can be opened to show hosts, or sub-groups nested within. The operator can create groups, and sub-groups via the gui.

NetworkControl is a utility to control and monitor network interfaces, including wireless ones (for which you see a signal strength meter, as shown).

NetworkControl addresses a conspicuous lack in most Linux distributions — most tend to be short on easy-to-use network utilities, even something as trivial as a robust, informative way to log on and off a dialup connection. NetworkControl also provides the connection IP, configuration and statistics (gleaned from "ifconfig" and updated each second), and provides graphic signal levels for wireless interfaces, handy for evaluating a system of wireless devices.

NetworkControl allows you to see network activity at a glance and lets you control your network interfaces in a fast, convenient way. It is designed to be easy to use and informative.

If you have downloaded the binary, just put it in /usr/local/bin, give it executable permissions and run it like this:
networkcontrol

You can make a desktop shortcut with this as its executable target.

If you have downloaded the source package:
Put it in any convenient location.
tar -xjf networkcontrol.tar.bz2
cd networkcontrol.dist
./auto_install.sh

If you dont want the automatic installation or you want to fine-tune the process, instead of running "auto_install.sh", after the unpacking step above, do this:

make -f Makefile.cvs dist
./configure
make
sudo make install

Obviously you may want to modify some of these steps to suit your platform.

The Network Security Monitor Daemon is a lightweight network security monitor for TCP/IP LANs. It will capture certain network events and record them in a relational database. The recorded data is available for analysis through a CGI-based interface.
You can run test version with ./Monitord, just to see how it works. Production version should be run in background, v.g. with nohup ./monitord &. Both versions will accept a device name as a parameter (default: eth0). You can send them SIGHUP at any time to print some stats. If you send SIGTERM, SIGQUIT or SIGINT, all threads will end gracefully.
Enhancements:
- Linux Kernel with "packet sockets" and "socket filtering" support.
- GNU C Library 2 (glibc2) with LinuxThreads support. (integrated in most recent versions).
- Full MySQL, including headers and libmysqlclient_r.
- GNU C Compiler (gcc).
- GNU Make (make).
- Perl (perl).
- Wget (wget).
Enhancements:
- Added chmod 4755 ... in Makefile
- Root should run make now, but not the daemon ;-)
- The daemon will drop root privileges as soon as possible
- (after creating the raw socket with an attached linux socket
- filter and putting the interface in promiscuous mode)
- No threads run with root privileges so its much safer
- (specially the new server thread which reads remote user input)
- Added stats thread
- To calculate/mantain exponential averages
- Added server thread
- It accepts HTTP requests and serves stats in XML

Network Security Toolkit is a bootable ISO live CD and its based on Fedora Core 2.
The toolkit was designed to provide easy access to best-of-breed Open Source Network Security Applications and should run on most x86 platforms.
The main intent of developing this toolkit was to provide the network security administrator with a comprehensive set of Open Source Network Security Tools. The majority of tools published in the article: Top 75 Security Tools by insecure.org are available in the toolkit.
What we find rather fascinating with NST is that we can transform most x86 systems (Pentium II and above) into a system designed for network traffic analysis, intrusion detection, network packet generation, wireless network monitoring, a virtual system service server, or a sophisticated network/host scanner.
This can all be done without disturbing or modifying any underlying sub-system disk. NST can be up and running on a typical x86 notebook in less than a minute by just rebooting with the NST ISO CD. The notebooks hard disk will not be altered in any way.
NST also makes an excellent tool to help one with all sorts of crash recovery troubleshooting scenarios and situations.
Enhancements:
- We are pleased to announce the latest NST release: v1.5.0. This release is based on Fedora Core 5 using the Linux kernel 2.6.18. Here are some of the highlights for this release: the NST Web User Interface (WUI), has been greatly enhanced and cleaned up; extensive additions to managing and analyzing network packet captures; the ability to setup and manage printers; the ability to easily mount many different supported file system types; the ability to manage the NST as a file server (both NFS and CIFS); the addition of the Inprotect package (a Nessus manager); the addition of the Zabbix package (another network resource monitoring tool - similar to Nagios)....

Remote Monitoring Agent (RMA in short) is an auxiliary application for HostMonitor. Enterprise license for Advanced Host Monitor already includes license for 10 installations of the agent. Holders of a Lite, Standard or Professional licenses may buy an additional license for Remote Monitoring Agent separately.
HostMonitor 4.0+ can monitor remote networks using Remote Monitoring Agents (RMA). RMA is small application that accepts requests from HostMonitor, performs test and provides information about test result back to HostMonitor.
Why you may need RMA? Here are just several reasons:
RMA increases security of the network. When you have to run the tests such as CPU Usage test or Performance Counters tests on a remote Windows system, HostMonitor must be able to log in to that system with administrators privileges. Instead you may now use an agent installed on that remote system. In this case HostMonitor will not have to log on to that system at all. HostMonitor needs just one TCP port to communicate with the RMA agent (by default it uses #1055 port, however you may set an agent to use any other port).
Remote Monitoring Agent is also a very useful tool when you have to monitor two (or many) separated networks (connected through Internet). In this case installing just one instance of RMA behind the firewall in network "A" will allow to monitor entire network "A" using the HostMonitor located in the network "B" with just one open TCP port.
RMA decreases the network traffic. E.g. frequent use of "File Integrity" or "Compare Files" tests in an array of remote systems may apply significant load on the network. The more and the bigger files you test the more traffic increase you get. RMA runs locally and sends only the test results to the HostMonitor thus decreasing the amount of network traffic.
Remote Monitoring Agent simplifies network administration. You no longer need to share local drives/folders to perform tests such as File Integrity, Folder/File Size, File Availability, Count Files, etc
RMA for Linux / BSD / Solaris allows you to perform tests that HostMonitor cannot perform. For example HostMonitor cannot monitor processes that are running on Linux systems. RMA can do that.
Main features:
- All traffic between Remote Monitoring Agents and HostMonitor is encrypted.
- It is possible to customize the list of enabled tests for each of the agents (e.g. living only Count Files and UNC tests only).
- You can restrict incoming TCP connections with the list of acceptable addresses.
- With RMA Manager you may configure, restart and even upgrade agent(s) remotely.

Monitoring API project is a multi-user programming interface designed to simplify the development of network monitoring software and allows users to express their monitoring needs in a device-independent way.
The main abstraction provided by MAPI is the network flow. Although flows have been used before in network monitoring systems, MAPI gives flows a first-class status. Applications that uses MAPI can specify what flows or flow statistics they are interested in by applying functions to flows.
A MAPI function can be a BPF filter, string search, packet counter or more advanced like a NetFlow generator. These function will automatically run in hardware if there is support for it on the hardware being used.
MAPI currently supports the following hardware:
- Normal NICs through libpcap
- DAG cards without co-processor
- SCAMPI adapter
Enhancements:
- This release includes support for distributed monitoring, several new MAPI functions, demo applications, and a lot of bugfixes.

X Interface Monitor (abbriviated xifmon) monitors any network interface (most suitable, the ppp# interface) for traffic, load average, and various other statistics using purly ioctl() directly to the Linux kernel.

It also has options to run `connect and `disconnect scripts, for dialup modem users who want easy connecting and disconnecting.