How to monitor IP SLA with free tools

Lately I saw an increasing interest for IP SLA monitor and analyze of the data output. I believe that you already know that you can do IP SLA monitor with a lot of tools from the most expensive ones which include support and assistance to the free ones like MRTG or RRDTOOL. From the statistics that I have, more than 50% of the network engineers interested in this tools have a problem either with the money (low budget or the on and on “we do not have money this year for that investment” ) or making free tools actually work and report accurate data.

Yesterday I received an e-mail from SolarWinds that announce me about their FREE IP SLA monitor tool. Usually I ignore such e-mails as for most of them there is always a catch, but since it was from a company that made me a very good impression over the year by offering exactly what’s specified in the advertisement, I said that I should give it a try. Before I present this to you, let’s make something clear. This is not a commercial post, e.g. post to be pay or another things like that. I do not have time and I don’t want to do such stuff of my blog, but when some product really worth to be tried I think that the development company deserve to be specified.

Since it’s a free tool don’t expect to have all the features of the one which you are paying for it, but compared to the headache of implementing other free tools (MRTG, RRDTOOL) you’ll find this one to be piece of cake. Everybody who has an idea about networking can use this without any problems. Configuration is as simplest as it can be. You have to choose the destination IP or hostname to monitor then pick the monitor service and polish some parameters to your particular network. That’s it! One particular issue to me is that this tool is working only from Windows.

Please have a look below to see how to configure this:

IP SLA monitor tool

Published by

Calin

Calin is a network engineer, with more than 20 years of experience in designing, installing, troubleshooting, and maintaining large enterprise WAN and LAN networks.

5 thoughts on “How to monitor IP SLA with free tools”

  1. Good job! Very useful and easy to configure. Of course it will not give you all the features of the MRTG for example, but perfect for day to day operation.

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