Plain, unadorned Snort will do what you need it to do, and it will save its findings to its own set of log files. However, reading through log files to discern network traffic trends can get a bit tedious, so you'll want some tools to help you out. The best tools are the graphical ones, which can give you a good visualization of what's going on with your network.
One example is the Basic Analysis and Security Engine (BASE), as shown in the following screenshot:
There are several more, but I'll show them to you when we get to the Security Onion section.
You can find out more about BASE from the author's Professionally Evil website: https://professionallyevil.com/
Now that you've seen how to set up Snort the old-fashioned way, let's look at the easy way.