How to test Network monitoring?

Question

I'm currently building a network monitoring system that will notify me if any interface errors or network issues. after building it we would like to be able to test if it works before implementing it to our network, so need a way of simulating network interface errors on a switch or networking device?

I was thinking about cutting ethernet cables or terminating them wrong, but ideally I need soemthing that can create loads of different types of interface errors

any help would be much appreciated

Sean

Answer 1

You could download Nagios which is a powerful, enterprise-class host, service, application, and network monitoring program. Designed to be fast, flexible, and rock-solid stable. Nagios runs on *NIX hosts and can monitor Windows, Linux/Unix/BSD, Netware, and network devices.

you can download other network monitoring systems from sourceforge they have many different network tools written in different languages most of them are open source. you can take notes of their design and maybe add to the application you building.

if you want to test your application the best thing to do is to tested on real environment, I believe their might be one or two Virtual Lab.

But Ideally I would tested on real interfaces

Answer 2

One of the ways to simulate network failures would be to dynamically change the firewall settings. You can make packets drop, hosts, disappear, etc. This doesn't require any physical damage to anything :)