The DNSStuff article located at http://www.dnsstuff.com/free-network-monitoring-

Question

The DNSStuff article located at http://www.dnsstuff.com/free-network-monitoring-software offers some interesting takes on the differences between open source (where the tools source code is public and users can work with developers to improve the tool over time) and commercial network monitoring tools. For this week's discussion, summarize what the author of the article says are the pros and cons of open source versus commercial network monitoring software. If you were a network administrator, would you choose commercial or open source for your network monitoring tool? Why? Please respond with your discussion post of at least 300 words

Explanation / Answer

Network monitoring is a very tedious and time consuming job for network administrators. This being the case so many network monitoring tools came up, be it open source or licensed. The challenge a network administrator may get is to keep 100% up-time and network security intact. Network monitoring tools prove helpful in a great deal to the network administrators. The point of discussion is whether to opt for open source or licensed versions. In my opinion both of the options have their ups and downs. Some of the open sourced tools are brilliant in their working but may or may not be a threat to the network security. Though the open source communities do have some great tools but maybe a miscreant may introduce a malware into the open source code and this may pose a threat to the whole network, there are many a great deal of open source tools like the one I have used in my environment and its name is netTools, it was very basic and was only to inform the network administrator if a network was not responding to the pings, since this tool only pinged the IP you listed onto it and report back if a ping was missed. The problem with using free software is

1) They are not as user friendly as the licensed.

2) In case of any malware attack you cannot approach anybody to sue or anything which is not there in case of licensed.

3) Licensed tools are much more user friendly and easy to install and configure than open-source.

4) It’s always better to trust a licensed tool for a secured environment.

There can be two takes from this

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