Gear and Tools¶
The practical kit of a working network engineer: what goes in the bag, what runs on the laptop, and which platforms you will meet for addressing, monitoring, packet capture and day-to-day terminal work. Roundups compare tools honestly, including licence and weaknesses, and no article here earns money from a recommendation.
Articles¶
- The Network Engineer's Field Bag: console cables, fiber cleaning and inspection, optic and cable testers, PoE testers, labels, and the laptop setup that goes with them.
- IPAM and Source-of-Truth Tools: NetBox, Nautobot, phpIPAM, Infoblox, BlueCat and spreadsheets compared.
- Network Monitoring Stacks: LibreNMS, Zabbix, Prometheus with Grafana, Telegraf and InfluxDB, PRTG and SolarWinds compared.
- Packet Analyzers and Capture: Wireshark filters, tshark, tcpdump, Embedded Packet Capture on IOS XE, and SPAN or ERSPAN to a capture box.
- Terminal and Productivity Tools: SSH clients, tmux, VS Code, diff tools and config backup with Oxidized or RANCID.
If you are building a practice environment rather than a field kit, see the CCNP course lab setup guide. - Choosing a Console Server for the Data Center: Port types and pinouts, USB consoles, cellular out-of-band, security, automation APIs and how to design the OOB network.
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