Wireshark · Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] How can Ethereal know that my network is congested

[Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>]

Ronald Prague wrote:

> Ethereal is a great tool for realtime troubleshooting and data mining, 
> but its not the best tool for measuring data over long periods of time 
> or doing trending and history for you.

Good point - Ethereal is a tool for the same ecological niche as tools 
such as Network General's Sniffer, WildPackets' EtherPeek/AiroPeek/etc., 
Microsoft's Network Monitor, and so on.  It's a tool for capturing 
traffic, looking at packets in detail, and doing some statistical 
processing on a particular capture.

It's not an intrusion detection system, or a monitoring tool that looks 
for trends and provides alerts for them - it arguably both does too much 
and too little for that ("too much" in the sense that it analyzes the 
packets in more detail than would be needed for those applications).  It 
is not, and it is not intended to be, the be-all and end-all of network 
traffic capture and processing applications.

> If you think you’re having 
> uplink congestion, I strongly recommend you try out one of the great 
> RRDTOOL based suites like cacti, nmis or nagios.

RRDTOOL:

	http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/rrdtool/

Cacti:

	http://www.cacti.net/

NMIS:

	http://www.sins.com.au/nmis/

Nagios:

	http://www.nagios.org/

(Google is your friend).