Network Monitoring

[halla26]

Hi all!


Brief description of my system, I'm running a local network with 10 plus static IP devices on a unmanaged network.


Is there a reliable way of monitoring the network that would show me roughly the bandwidth used by said devices but also I could possibly setup if one of the devices dropped off the network?


Any help is much appreciated no matter how small! Thanks

 

[Ken Roach]

The first and most obvious solution is to replace the unmanaged switches with switches that have monitoring, if not management, features.

Another approach is to install a device that can use fairly standard tools like PING and reads of various SNMP network management parameters like packets/second from each device, and can report those in the format you want (e-mail, flashing light, data log).

There are a lot of off-the-shelf commercial tools for that sort of network monitoring; the first two that come to mind are Spiceworks and PRTG. If you have a general-purpose Windows or Unix/Linux computer on your network, it could run those tools. Often there is a small-network free version.

Taking a step back: what is the problem you're trying to solve ? Do you have devices that disconnect from the network or otherwise fail in a way that they can't announce, or that your automation system can't detect ?

 

[PLCMentor]

There are managed switches that have opc connectivity that would allow logging of diagnostic information. You could also probably hook a PC up running a utility that might perform this. It would probably add more bandwidth to the network tho so I agree with Ken's step back. Maybe get to what you are tying to solve and there is another way to look at the problem.

 

[Ken Roach]

While quarantined at home, I've been experimenting (my wife would say "playing") with an IIOT automation programming platform called "Node-Red". You can read and watch plenty of online tutorials and videos on it, and it fits well into the sort of function block programming that PLC programmers are accustomed to.

It is by no means a replacement for a purpose-built network monitoring toolkit or suite, but because it's a Swiss Army Knife of network, Internet, and automation bits it can do a lot of things.

Including the time to download and read about the SNMP library, and refresh my coffee, it took me about 15 minutes to sort out a simple program PINGing my 1756-ENBT (sure, I've got one at home) and sending my phone an e-mail if it was disconnected from the network.

It took another 30 minutes for me to figure out how to keep it from sending fresh e-mails every 30 seconds, because I'm a total beginner at Node-Red and JavaScript and had to figure out comparison with persistent values.

In my case, Node-Red is running on a Raspberry Pi in a DIN-rail mount case, connected over WiFi to the ship's router, linked by ordinary co-ax cable Internet to the pier.

 

[cardosocea]

To complement on Ken Roach's advice, Zabbix is free for network monitoring. You can download a version to play with (virtual machine) and learn and then install from scratch and deploy to get the devices information.



I played a bit with it at home and although it seems daunting, a day was enough to get it monitoring a couple of devices at the house.

 

[NetNathan]

A managed switch might be easier...