I'm looking for some software to monitor where the bandwidth is going on the network.
I've noticed lately that access to the Act! database on the server has become very slow (100MB network with 10 users) but I don't have any really good tools to find out why. I've put a number of cheapy programs that tell me the percentage of bandwidth used, but they don't tell me who the offenders are. I'm going to evaluate NTOP, so don't suggest that one, I'm looking for new stuff.
It's a windows 2k server. Kudos to suggestions that will monitor my my linux boxes (snmp?) as well.
Points go to the best software (other than ntop)
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you can monitor each system with netlimiter 2 (the free bandwith monitor they offer will tell you what processes are using what ammount of bandwith)
I don't think this can be centraly managed, but if you only have 10 systems, shoulden't be too bad testing each one. Also check your wiering for bad wires, this can cause droped packets, retransmits, and therefore slow the network down.
http://www.webmin.com/
now ported to Windows.
It has a place for bandwidth monitor, although this will be a log, rather than real time.
I suspect your offenders are using something like BitTorrent, a notorius bandwidth stealer used by heavy downloaders and gamers. Any gamers at your company?
GinEric, the bittorrent suggestion is off track. The issue people using up our internet connection, it's their direct connection to the file server. It's the only one the users use and lately it's started slowing down. I've used webmin on my linux boxes before, but from what I saw it only gives you a summary of all traffic.
The perfect solution would be some device that sits on the network and monitors all traffic to and from each device. Then I can drill down to a specific device and see exactly WHAT IP's are using up the most traffic to that device. I'm sure this could be done, but with very expensive software.
Looks like I have a number of programs to install so I can award these points.
Most of the traffic I see slowing things down is general passthrough connection abuse by internal downloaders, sorry, didn't mean to offend anyone.
The named.conf file can be optioned for Linux to build query and activity logs. I suppose webmin and webalizer can then be used to generate reports.
I'm trying LanSurveyor, but with an a.b.x.y/16 prefix block network, it's taking forever to discover all nodes.
Maybe there's something on SourceForge.net for both Windows and Linux.
Still, the named.conf options works, as it captures every activity, but the logs can get big fairly quickly. Finding a suitable program to analyze the logs is more of a task than actually capturing the data.
Be back whenever LanSurveyor finishes discovering all nodes.
funny, while trying to find a vu meter software, I kept coming across software meters and analyzers for bandwidth monitoring. Aside from "vu meter software" and "LED Bargraph software" coming up with bandwidth monitoring, I didn't seem to find what I wanted, which is a simple bargraph plugin for multitrack recording.
LanSurveryor was kind of sloppy and very slow, but showed unusual pictures of everyone on my ISP's network, including computer names, reverse records, whether IP assigned was static or not. I'll keep it for that alone.
Just one that I found, and there hundreds of them:
http://www.freedownloadsce
What you probably want is something where you can select a bargraph per IP Address that you can assign to monitor, or one that takes the top ten bandwidth using IP Addresses and displays them for you. Nice ideas huh?
The googled and dogpiled Internet has become a mish mosh of finding things by trial and guess error.
By the way, some routers come with IP Traffic monitors and reporters, some with real time displays. The LED Bargraph idea is a nice addition and feature though, glad I found these programs myself.
Disagree
How can this question be both accepted and deleted?
As an aside, running bind with a logging option of about 300 meg he can easily see where all the traffic is going simply by looking at the log, i.e., at a glance.
Here is how I do it: http://www.Musics.com/manh
That's the options file for bind placed in the config file. I also adjunct this with LanSurveyor and NetStatLive [on Windows boxes].
Anyone can script out code to display the contents of the named log as a graph, it's not that hard, but he wants to find out where the traffic is going and the logs for named will show that, if he sets the logs up correctly.
Just didn't want this question to suddenly disappear knowing that there was an existing answer.
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by: rpalmeira22Posted on 2006-02-07 at 12:42:09ID: 15896360
you'd want something to monitor on the network level, like layer 2/3 depending on your setup. If you want to go hardcare, Ethereal or some other packet capture but it takes a lot of anaylsys and if you split your broadcast domains significantly you'll need to find a bottleneck point somewhere to monitor at. Maybe something like Nagios? http://www.nagios.org/
There's a Java based piece of software that I like for it's interface called Network Probe. http://www.objectplanet.co
Also HHDSoftware http://www.hhdsoftware.com