Network Monitoring System: Solutions needed

I have requirement from my client to do a network monitoring services for his company, I dont have any idea on it. If you could help or give me some ideas on which solutions should I used it would be very helpfull.

My cleint office consist of:

1. 50 unit of Workstation
2. Mail, Web and also File servers
3. Firewall (Standard)
4. 2Mb dedicated Leased Line.

If there any chances I could monitor the network remotely from my place if would be easier.I need to find a cheap and reliable solutions, If there any..

Thanks.

Depends what level of monitoring you want to do.. if its just traffic analysis on routers or suchlike then you can check out MRTG - Multi Router Traffic Graph.

Do you need to monitor, or administer and manage ? for monitoring there are lots of web based interfaces to check the health of the servers etc etc. If you wanna manage then you should set up some form of remote access for yourself, PCanywhere, or VNC, or even just SSH daemon.

While you're saying you want the solution to be cheap and reliable, don't forget secure.... make sure you choose some method that only allows you to monitor / change things.

Otherwise there's always SNMP if you're so inclined.

That's exactly what I was asking myself. Are we talking about monitoring or adminstration?

I've recently implemented an awesome network monitoring system at my company's network, which allows me to track all services provided on every server, externally and internally.

Its called "Nagios" and is a slight pain the butt to setup, but does wonders and a very good job monitoring the network. I downloaded a few commercial products, and none came close to what Nagios offered. I'm considering even doing a review on the product at some point.

I'll see if I can post a few screen shots tomorrow from the office.

You can grab it at www.nagios.org