There are several reasons to decide to use a network management and monitoring system for your LAN, WAN, WLAN:

• Control the state of a bigger amount of infrastructure products
• You have a lot of client components
• There are important security aspects that have to be checked
• Maintenance of configurations, firmware versions etc.
• Control components that are not under direct access (far away or in areas with difficult or only temporarily access)
• … I’m sure I have missed some reasons

For huge networks there are professional products available e.g. from Cisco (LAN management), ComputerAssociates (Infrastructure Management), HP (OpenView) and IBM (Tivoli). That could be the right products for companies with different locations but for smaller networks the requirements and the price might be too high.

When you look for WLAN management you find wireless switches/controllers for the management of access points. These systems are focused on the wireless components of the same vendor. Other commercial products did not support all devices that you will find in a heterogeneous environment and it may be hard to add the missing components. Most costumers have installation with different type of access points (may be from the same manufacturer but different AP versions). But at least if you check the client devices you normally could be sure that you will find at least various WLAN adapters. Then you have no homogeneous WLAN.

As I saw the requirement to spend some effort to manage and control all devices in a heterogeneous network environment I checked the possibilities of open source and free products.

Here are my candidates:

Update 03-04-2010:

• Nagios: Works under LINUX or as a VMWare Image under Windows. A great system but right now the development is at least very slow. We could only see bugfixes at the moment.
• Spiceworks: Works under Windows. Had much problems to get the system up and running. Nice user interface and a good system for supporting puposes but not a system for network monitoring.
• The Dude: Works under Windows or on LINUX under WINE. Good system and easy to set up if you have understood how to configure it. But to find out how to configure this system is not an easy task. The documentation is based on an older version and is not complete. Answers could be found in the video clips and in the user forum. To learn The Dude often means to look for the pieces you might need and try it yourself.
• Shinken: A new implementation of Nagios. Right now – not tested.
• OpenNMS: Not tested.
• Zabbix: Not tested.

For the monitoring purpose you normally need SNMP-GET that is supported by the tools above. If you would like to make changes on your devices it may require additional tools:

• NET-SNMP
• FreeSNMP

Related posts:

1. WLAN Tools
2. Webapplications vs. Local Installations