PSU VoIPToday I attended an all-day training session with the aforementioned title. I already have some experience using open source tools: we use Smokeping, Cricket/RRDTool, Multicast Beacon, and others. I have some experience with Wireshark. The value in today's training was hearing an experienced network professional (Mike Pennacchi of Network Protocol Specialists) talk about how he uses these tools. Understanding the concepts and seeing an expert use the tools in certain ways is more helpful than just reading the documentation.
Aside from an extended session on Wireshark, which really helped me get a better grasp on its usefulness, the speaker presented a few other tools that were new to me. nTop can use Pcap or Netflow data to describe network usage. Nagios works well on its own but becomes a super power when combined with Centreon. I'm not trying to start a link farm here. These links will be useful when I get back to the office and find some time to start digging in.
Because this was a session on open source tools, there was a brief discussion about the "support" issue: who supports open source tools? One comment that I liked is that, even though there's nobody on the line to yell at, with most large open source projects, the answers you get from searching Google are better and faster than what you'd get from phone support, anyway. I hate to admit this, because it makes me the last stop of responsibility in troubleshooting, but it's pretty accurate.
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