Free Network Monitoring Tools

No matter what kind of websites or networks that you've got online today, keeping a close eye on them is just imperative. 

Making sure that you know when anything is happening inside your site or your network gives you the advantage because you can call a halt to nefarious movement or bring a site back up and online quickly instead of leaving it down and losing money overnight. 

That's where networking monitoring tools come in handy and in fact are an absolute necessity for the website owner today.

Fortunately there are a fairly broad number of tools that you can use which will help you to ensure the integrity of your sites and your network. 

Many of these are open source or freeware tools that will help you to supervise your sites. Some will send you a note in email while others will even send you a text message if there is a problem with your site. A few have iPhone or smart phone applications that you can use to monitor your sites and keep your servers running while you're on the go.

They help you to detect intrusions and to ensure that your site is online and remains online, alerting you if it is not.

No website is without problems. These sites are often our lifeblood. 

They represent our business or they may even be our sole business in the case of companies who do not have a brick and mortar storefront. Keeping the websites online and making sure they are free of malware or adware injections is part of your responsibility to ensure the computer safety and security of your users.

Network monitoring 

contrary to public opinion, can be done by the use of freeware tools and does not require high priced software. 

The free software and free tools are quite often comparable in design and even in support to those which are being sold for many hundreds of dollars. They have some very distinct benefits over those for-pay tools in many instances.

 
One good example of this is the hundreds if not thousands of people who enter into the open source or freeware software to support it. Updates, code changes and improvements are made which make the software more full featured and more able to detect the new threats or problems to your website. 

The use of free or open source software in network monitoring can be the best choice that it's possible to make.

Windows Network Monitoring

One of the most commonly used operating systems today is Windows. 

As with anything else, the more popular that a given operating system or item becomes, the more likely it is to be the target of people who would use it to their own ends. 

Windows, like any other operating system which is vastly popular, is no exception to that rule.

Windows operating systems and Windows networks are prone to attempted breaches, which means that monitoring them is imperative. 

While some Windows systems give you a basic method of monitoring your network, they don't help you to see what kind of applications are using the network or running in the background.

Having this information to hand is very important if you need to discover and to terminate any kind of programs that are using your bandwidth or are using an injected malware.

Some Windows network monitoring can take place using the built in software and network monitoring tools that Windows 7 or Windows 8 offers you. 

If you're looking for just basic network monitoring, you may not need to worry about third party network monitoring tools, but rather may just be able to get the information that you need using the Windows tools.

Taking a look at processes running in the background, as well as who is connected to your network is possible in Windows 7. 

Making sure that they are supposed to be there, what kind of load they are using and whether or not they are slowing your service is another way that the Windows network monitoring tools can help you.

In order to monitor your windows network all that you'll need to do is to go to the Windows task manager. 

If you're interested in how active the network is click performance and review the Ethernet or the WiFi sections to review that information. It is easy to view and easy to understand. You can even check on your own IP address.

Your Task manager is going to give you links to network monitoring information that is slightly more advanced and which will give you all of the information on every single active component of your network.

It will tell you how much data is being sent and received, where it's coming from and how much of an impact it has on the network resources.

Bear in mind that these built in tools do have their limits. 

If you require more than this, need to see more deeply into the network, you're going to have to install some Windows monitoring tools from the outside. 

A wide array of freeware is out there that can help you to take a closer look at all of the network information and won't cost you a penny. 

Much of it is even easy to install and simple to use. If you're using Windows network monitoring tools and they aren't quite what you're looking for, it may behoove you to look into other tools that can help you to get a closer look at your home or professional network.

Discovering The Internal Office Network

It is not unusual for an office or company with multiple computers to have an internal network. 

Sometimes these are used to deliver the same internet access to all the machines in order to provide communal utilities like a printer. 

Internal network also allow there to be a file management system put in place by the office for sharing work or even inter location communication. 

One of the crucial parts of IT technician training is the maintenance of these networks, but it would be unusual to graduate from modern business programs without knowing how to function on a network.

When setting up a network there are certain best practices to follow. 

Generally, there will either be a wireless connection or a wired connection. 

Wireless means special care setting up the router within broadcast range of the entire network, while a wired network means clever cable placement. 

It is a good idea to change the factory pre-set passwords, since more often than not a user name of "admin" and a password of "password" is an easy guess for even an amateur hacker.

Similarly, an internal network should have good passwords protecting intrusion, and if you have sensitive data, practice good habits, whether you're handling industry secrets or client billing information. 

At its extreme that could even mean protecting the router jacks from unauthorized plugins and hiring someone to constantly monitor the network, but regular checkups and a responsible attitude about passwords are suitable options. 

Still, remember: Business programs teach due diligence and the survival of the company could depend on only authorized people being allowed into the network.

Not everyone wants their files stored locally. 

You might have a central server like the old fashioned mainframe computer systems of the past, where the office desktops are more like access terminals for collective access, or you might want to rely on any number of cloud computing solutions. 

Very simple operations are actually often included as part of a web design program, as they need to move their files around on servers and the like as well.

If you function with multiple offices, you will also need to secure the connection between locations. 

Another reason to rely on this sort of thing is that it allows you to email between franchises or locations without having the distraction or risk of an open internet connection.

 
On the economical investment front, as well as an internal network, you might want a web architect to help you organize everything for your office server into a sensible system. 

Streamlined internal communications could save you money in the long run. 

Or there are plenty of cheap or low cost services that have ready to go services for you! Research your options and the savings could really surprise you.

Top Three Network Monitoring Tools

Every network requires a closer look now and then to ensure that it remains safe from instrusion and that your websites or network stay online providing the function that you need. 

It doesn't have to cost the earth for you to be able to get that closer look at your websites and your own hosting. 

It's quite easy to set up a network monitoring tool that can help you to dig a little deeper into the networks that you manage.

Some of the best network monitors out there are free for your use and don't require a great deal of setup time to get them working for you. 

The top three network monitoring software is listed here for your convenience.

Ganglia is a tool that can assist you to see how all of the machines on your network are doing all at one time. 

It's hard, when you have a wide range of machinery up and running to check on the health of all of them, but Ganglia gives you that ability. 

For one machine or even two, it's probably overkill, but if you're the proud possessor of an entire business network, getting Ganglia can give you a good look at what's out there and how it's working.

Monit, another of the freeware monitors can not only keep a close eye on your servers but it can, based on the ideas and input that you give it, also try to rectify problems such as server crashes or database issues. 

It can actively restart your servers if you tell it to do so in a predefined condition. It's a very simple way to monitor your servers and it includes an app for your iPhone.

Munin is a monitoring tool that graphs the metrics of a system. 

It produces a graph daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly. 

It reports back to you on a wide range of different metrics and monitors the core systems their memory, the CPU that they are using, the disk space being used and how much is left, as well as other things such as the Squid, Apache, and MySQL databases. 

It is very simple and easy to use, and uses plugins that you can write simply with just a few lines of code. 

Freeware, Munin is one of the top monitoring software out there for use by individuals as well as corporations.

 
As you can see, network monitoring is easy to use and easy to deploy. 

It doesn't have to cost the earth if you're using the freeware applications that are out there for you.

Tips And Tricks To Improve Your Computers Performance

You can tweak almost every component of your PC to make its performance optimal. 

You only have to look for computer tips and tricks. 

You can tweak its hardware to make it work faster and more efficient than it usually does and its software to make all applications that are installed on your computer run perfectly with as efficient resources as possible. 

This article features some tips and tricks that guide you to weak or to tune up your PC's hardware and software.

Tweaking Your Computer's Hardware

There are a number of hardware components of your PC that you can tune up in order to improve its performance. 

Because the most essential part of your computer is its processor, you can start by tweaking it. 

Overclock is the most familiar term that PC users usually use to refer to CPU tune-up process. 

There are two easy ways to tweak your computer's CPU. 

If your computer is manufactured within the last four years, you can easily overclock your PC's CPU by modifying its BIOS or UEFI BIOS setup. 

When you access your computer's BIOS, you should try to locate CPU Operating Speed, FSB Clock and PCI Clock settings and alter their values. 

If you cannot find those settings in your PC's BIOS, then your computer is an old one. 

For old PC, overclocking can be done by changing the jumper settings of your computer's motherboard. 

Because different CPUs have different performance peak, there is no universal rule of how to overclock your CPU. 

You can experiment with different settings until you figure out the performance peak of your PC. 

If you have assigned a particular value to your CPU clock speed setting and the PC crashes or doesn't boot properly when you turn it on, then your computer has gone beyond its performance peak. 

You should thus lower that value a little bit in order to keep your computer running properly. 

If you cannot access the BIOS to reset its settings, you should locate the motherboard's 3-pin jumper labeled "reset bios" or "clear CMOS," remove the jumper that connects the first and the second pins, and attach it to connect the second and the third pins. 

Some new computers allow you to tune up the performance of their CPU and Video card by using built-in application that you can access after you start your computer.

Tweaking Your Computer's Software

Tweaking your computer's software is much simpler and easier than tweaking its hardware. 

You can use third-party applications to tweak your computer's system environment, alter its operating system by using the already installed standalone programs, or alter the setting of all applications that are installed on it.

There is a large selection of third-party programs that you can use to do some tweaking jobs on your PC. 

You can, for example, use Teracopy to copy files and folders much more quickly or use BatteryCare to extend your laptop's battery life. 

Just surf the internet and you can mostly find hundreds of programs that you can use to tweak your computer.

You can also tweak your computer's operating system by altering its settings using any built-in applications that are installed on your computer when you install its operating system. 

If you are using Windows operating system, for example, you can prevent it from making record of recent files that you open by accessing its taskbar and start menu properties setting or prevent it from running autoplay function by altering its group policy setting (GPEDIT.MSC) if you are using Windows XP or by changing its autoplay setting at Control Panel if you are using the later versions of Windows.

A number of programs that you have installed on your computer also have standalone tweaking functions. 

If you are interested in knowing the hidden features of all programs that you install on your computer, you can try to search for its "hidden features" or "Easter eggs" by using internet.