If you must run it on a windowsbox then go for PRTG from http://www.paessler.com/
Otherwise LibreNMS ( http://www.librenms.org/ ) is tehshit, if you dont want a dedicated box to run this on then install Virtualbox and run LibreNMS as a VM-guest at one of your windowsboxes.
Take a look at LibreNMS. Use it for generic monitoring of everything, and use something else (possibly Nagios or Icinga) for monitoring specific details that LibreNMS don't catch.
Like ElectroSpore said, if you want it just per-port, enable snmp and graph it with your favorite util. Netflow will have a performance cost.
I use LibreNMS to monitor my ERX. And the Edgeswitch. And every computer I have. And my UPS with a raspberrypi. And ...
Adam Armstrong is one of the worst people in software I've ever seen. Some developers will go on rants for good reasons. He almost always goes on rants because people ask for features, or ask for clarification on how something works, or give him general feedback. His software is Observium, and the better alternative is LibreNMS, which was forked from Observium while it was under a more open license.
Alerts on the paid edition is pretty bare fucking bones. I was thinking about purchasing it, but I went into their chat (like so many have) and simple asked "are there plans to implement new notification options in the future?" I was told to gtfo..so I did. No problem. Pretty simple answer for us.
I currently still use the comm. edition and will shortly migrate over to LibreNMS, which is a fork of Observium (and it has the modern alert options: hipchat, slack, sms, etc. Plus, it's also actively developed).
EDIT: Pigs do fly. Apparently, they just added rudimentary support for hipchat/slack about a week ago.
Just hope you don't ever need to do something that Adama doesn't like.
At least now we have LibreNMS for when you don't want to deal with a giant asshole of a project leader.
For reporting and alerting-- LibreNMS. A free license fork of the observium product, it's very well maintained and most importantly, just works(TM).
I paid for an app called Pushover on my phone for an out of band alerting system (by that I mean-- I don't check my e-mail at night but I would want to know if the server farm fell over), and LibreNMS pushes alerts into it. I am running LibreNMS on Debian Linux, but there is also a pre-built appliance based on Ubuntu available. I also have e-mail alerts enabled for archiving purposes. Different users can have different alerting settings.
I've also modded smokeping into my install, and that's probably the most useful tool in my arsenal since I run a multi-site install. For you, it may or may not have value. If you run a latency sensitive VoIP infrastructure it's huge though.
Use LibreNMS http://www.librenms.org/
Observium dev is an incredible pain in butt if you want to provide any changes, especially mibs. LibreNMS is a fork to avoid the toxic mess.
Edit: See more here - http://www.reddit.com/r/networking/comments/3asq3d/what_do_you_use_for_monitoring/csfnt17
I was using Observium as well but them came across http://www.librenms.org which is an true open source fork of observium that has more features at $0 cost. Allows you to setup alerts and supports plugins.
I just started setting up LibreNMS on a RPi. I only have it collecting data on a few hosts so far, but it's responding well. Like /u/farptr said, if you don't have something that supports NetFlow or similar, you're in a pickle. I run a Ubiquity EdgeRouter X between my modem & network that gives me the best view of what's going in & out of my network. Good luck!
Edit: as /u/mikeb93 points out, LibreNMS is more of just monitoring. I guess you need to provide details on what you want out of the software. If its just config backup, lookup oxidized
Rancid is a config back up tool, not the same as Network Management Software (NMS).
There are ways to encrypt passwords in Rancid configs as well. If you're looking for an alternate config backup tool, try Oxidized. You could also use gitlab as a repository to send the configs from Rancid.
Now, if you are looking for a NMS that runs on Ubuntu, you can start with LibreNMS.
LibreNMS should do what you are looking for.
If you are looking for just basic monitoring with no alerting, Observium will do the trick. It will show you CPU, Bandwidth, memory, port usage, interface errors etc.
LibreNMS is essentially a fork of Observium which does just about the same exact thing.
I have setup both which are fairly easy given you have some linux experience. If I had to recommend one it would be LibreNMS.
One easy to scale method is to start monitoring all desktops, and set up alerts for memory amount changes. There are so many suites that should be able to help you with this.
If you need a cost-effective solution, I would recommend LibreNMS : http://www.librenms.org/
The sooner you can report this to authorities in your organisation, the sooner you can start generating patterns and correlate that to who did it (possibly/probably) based on access, etc.
Mate I feel for you I really do. Zabbix can be awesomely great and then it can make you spend 3 weeks trying to get a trigger to function correctly.
Take a look at LibreNMS instead.
We use NfSen (http://nfsen.sourceforge.net/) to monitor flows and Observium to monitor via SNMP. In general we like to do Observium for managed switches by default and NfSen on firewalls when a client complains about internet speeds. If I was inclined I'd replace Observium with LibreNMS (http://www.librenms.org/) but I'm too busy to add more work for myself.
seems like there was an update this night:
1.56-34-g25e8de3 - Thu Oct 17 2019 04:46:44 GMT+0200
Seems like www.librenms.org is down as well....
Doesn't look like anyone mentioned LibreNMS yet! It's free, open source, and selfhosted. It can run on a Pi. It's an SNMP tool, but has the feature of creating bandwidth "bills" to track usage.
http://imgur.com/a/NYW44 (note that I am on RCN and don't have a bandwidth cap, I just put that in there as an easy reference for myself)
Edit: totally works with the ER-X (I have an Edgerouter POE myself). And you can set alerts for when devices go down, and it will visualize other cool stuff for you! Oh, it does not do DPI, which I now see is one of your requirements.
I don't see it getting mentioned much on this subreddit. But I use LibreNMS for monitoring of general system stats via SNMP. EDIT: I've got it running on a cheap €3/mnt VPS. Polling 5 or 6 different servers/devices including my home router. Very useful to have.
I would look at the fork they did. http://www.librenms.org. It's updated a lot more and open source still and free. Here is what mine looks like. My docker LibreNMS monitoring my Raspberry Pi
LibreNMS is really nice and very easy to get going. Started on Cacti and worked my way through the options, now I have it set up to do alerts to pushover and life is great.
Assuming you have business class cable internet, you are paying for speeds UP TO 50mbps, not a consistent 50mbps.
I use librenms to monitor my bandwidth usage, but it doesn't do speed checks or latency checks.
I had typically just used Nagios, but I recently installed/deployed LibreNMS and so far it is pretty cool. I've not done much with it yet, but it appears to have quite a bit of potential. Long live SNMP!