Wednesday, November 14, 2007

AsItHappens - asithappens-0.41 released

AsItHappens Homepage

AsItHappens

AsItHappens is a real-time network statistic collector and grapher. It collects data from devices over a network and displays them on a graph, optionally storing collected data in a database for later retrieval. Current collection types include network response, bandwidth, processor usage, memory usage, Cisco NBAR, and Cisco NetFlow. AsItHappens polls data in regular intervals, which can be in the order of milliseconds, to give immediate feedback on network performance. In addition, AsItHappens can graphically display flow information from a packet capture file.

AsItHappens is free software released under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Features

AsItHappens provides the following features:
  • Granular collection of data to the point of collecting every second
  • Real-time graphing of collected data
  • Response data collection via ICMP or TCP/UDP echo
  • Inbound and outbound bandwidth data collection via SNMP
  • Processor and memory usage collection via SNMP using three different MIB locations
  • Cisco NBAR (Network-based Application Recognition) Top-N collection via SNMP
  • Cisco NetFlow Top-N collection via SNMP with flow grouping and match criteria options
  • Optional database storage of collection sessions
  • Retrieval of user-defined time intervals within a stored collection session
  • Graphical display of packet capture files e.g. capture files from tcpdump, Ethereal, etc.
  • Resizable graphing window with automatic scaling of graph data to fit
  • Options to define how to aggregate or interpolate data when graphing e.g. to show maximums instead of averages
  • The ability to add text labels to the graphing panel to explain desired areas of the graph

Screenshots

Bandwidth graph
Bandwidth Graph
NBAR graph
NBAR Graph
Netflow graph
Netflow Graph
Stored sessions
Database sessions
Packet capture graph
Capture Graph

Prerequisites

You need a Java Runtime Environment (JRE) or Java Development Kit (JDK) version 5.0 or higher.

You can download Java from here.

Download

The latest version of AsItHappens is 0.41. Four install packages are provided here for download:

The installer packages require a JRE version 5.0 or higher to first be installed, but, as mentioned in the previous section, the JRE is required for the application itself anyway.

The "installer-less" packages are provided in both "tgz" and "zip" format for convenience, but the contents are identical. Since the application is Java-based, the same files are used for Unix and Windows. I have also received several reports that AsItHappens works under OSX (using one of the "installer-less" packages).

Thierry Uso has ported AsItHappens to OpenVMS, and has made it available here. Good work Thierry!

Older releases can be found here, although I would recommend the latest.

Installation

INSTALL - the AsItHappens install instructions

Documentation

The documentation department, as is typical, needs work. At present, these files may help:
  • tips.txt - the sole scrap of usage documentation included with AsItHappens
  • CHANGES - find out what's new in the current release

Related Links

AsItHappens uses standard protocols (e.g. SNMP and ICMP) for bandwidth, host and response graphing. It also reports on (using SNMP) two Cisco technologies: NBAR and Netflow. Further information on these Cisco technologies is available at the following locations:
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