Hii...  

Check it out this tools...  

one of the good monitoring tools for network.

1. Nagios

http://www.nagios.org/download

2.BandwidthD

http://sourceforge.net/projects/bandwidthd/

3.Capsa Free

http://www.colasoft.com/capsa-free/

4.WireShark

https://www.wireshark.org/download.html

5.total network monitor

http://www.softinventive.com/products/total-network-monitor/

6.Splunk

http://www.splunk.com/en_us/download.html

As already mentioned, Nagios is a useful tool for monitoring the state of network connected devices. There are many built-in scripts you can use to monitor different services on a target network device, but you can also write your own script to do some custom monitoring/state checking.

If you would like to make some nice statistics on the network traffic based on switch ports/network interfaces, you could try Cacti, or Munin for example. For these to work you should enable SNMP on the devices you would like to monitor, and the machine running Cacti/Munin/etc. will poll them periodically via the network using SNMP. You'll need to configure a web server for these to work (they all have a web-based user interface, but the data polling from the network devices are done independently from the webserver as simple scripts executed by cron ).

They run fine under any Linux distribution, but haven't tried them under Win.

Hi Sara,

Depending on what you have to monitor (Network load, who does what and how much, who is on what port etch) and what you mean by equipment, consequently  the answer might be different.

If you want simple load monitoring on a certain interface nload might be good for you, if you need ultra-detailed information and cutting edge instruments to dissect the network and all the machines connected to it, nmap is "THE" tool for you.

Anyway, here is a very good list, they all work from command line, they are all free they all have extensive documentation:

http://www.binarytides.com/linux-commands-monitor-network/

best

Diego