Network engenier

[Sticked]

My dad says that to do his job as a network engenier he's going to need at least 5 systems to monitor traffic. Since i don't know about networking etc. i wanted to ask if they were all necessary or if maybe it could be done with more network adapters and virtual machines. Btw he's stil in the era of pentium4s and is going to have to update for missing pieces.

Sorry for my bad english.

[Lurick]

Depends on where and how the traffic needs to be monitored and captured.

Traffic monitoring in terms of analysis and seeing what's going through the system or captures?

Local SPAN from the switch to a host?

Remote SPAN to a host?

ERSPAN?

Captured on the device and then offloaded for analysis?

Why 5 different machines, do they need to be physically separated for some reason? Why can't all the traffic be piped to a single machine and filtered with Wireshark on the end capture host?

 

A single VM or machine running something like PRTG or a Netflow collector can monitor and display statistics from all of the devices.