Open source network monitoring tools you should care about: MRTG and RRDtool

From InfoWorld: Open source network monitoring tools you should care about: MRTG and RRDtool.

In today's "mash-up" application development craze, the innovation is being driven largely by the fact that APIs are now more open and accessible, and presentation layer technologies such as AJAX are creating very compelling new ways to visualize data streams from multiple services. Developers can get to services more easily, and with XML they can deliver the data in much more dynamic ways via web applications.

Similar trends are driving software development innovation today in network monitoring. Tools such as MRTG (Multi-Router Traffic Grapher) and RRD (Round Robin Database) make it possible to more easily collect data from a greater number of devices on the network, and convert the data into XML for easy consumption on the front end.