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, Cisco NetFlow and arbitrary SNMP OID. 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:

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 6 or higher.

You can download Java from here.

Important note: The prequisite Java version changed from 5.0 to 6 as of AsItHappens 0.54. If this is a real problem for you, let me know (contact details below), and if the move to version 6 proves too unpopular I'll consider removing the dependency on Java 6 and reverting to the Java 5.0 dependency.

Download

The latest version of AsItHappens is 0.60. 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

These files may help with understanding AsItHappens further:

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:

Credits

A sincere thanks to the following people for their contribution of feedback, bug reports, testing and suggestions: This project, as many others, relies on a mountain of other software, for which I am deeply grateful. I would like to thank at the very least everyone involved in the following development efforts: And a great deal more! I am truly humbled when I consider the sheer volume of freely given code that contributes to my computing environment.

Donate

It's a bit impractical for me to receive donations and there are much bigger causes out there anyway. So if you would like to say a financial thank-you for AsItHappens, I would receive endless amounts of energy and motivation if you contributed to this initiative that I've set up to help out some families in need. And this aside from the awesome privilege you'd get from making a big difference for these folks. I'll be tracking the donations made; if AsItHappens is successful in raising money for this worthwhile endeavour, I'm likely to spend more time on it. I'm even open to offers for the cause - name your price for the feature you want :-) So yeah, donate - and let me know!

Contact

At present, I am the support as such. I love getting feedback, so you can email me with any questions, comments, bug reports, or patches. If you're keen to contribute code, I'd be happy to give you any help you need to understand the code structure and where/how you could contribute.

The user part of my email address is mark. The domain part is abrahams.co.nz. As is customary, an at symbol separates these. This is my humble attempt to try to avoid the enthusiasm of email address harvesters.