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Bandwidth monitoring

We have a 300+ user company and last week we upgraded from a single T1 to a managed 3MB BGP solution. Since then we have had some intermittent bandwidth issues (sometimes for only 1-2 minutes, and sometimes 2 - 3 hrs). We run 3COM 4400 switches, Cisco 2600 routers, and a pix 515e firewall. We also have an iPrism device to monitor internet traffic. We need to determine if we are having issues with our new ISP or our end users are streaming media or downloading. If our people are downloading we would like to be able to document the unauthorized internet usage. Does anyone know of an easy way to monitor all bandwidth usage in our LAN and be able to report on total bandwidth usage by IP or netbios name? We have solarwinds, but we are not expert in using it, and I just didn't see anything in there that would give us this capability. Any help would be appreciated, thx in advance.

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yasirirfan

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yasirirfan

As far monitoring the users is concerned you can use websense or surfcontrol to contol and monitor them.

cheers

Yasir

AlliedAdmin

ASKER

Thanks Yasir, I'll try MRTG out. As for the internal users, I am not really interested in seeing the websites they visit and controlling that. We have iPrism which handles that. I just want to report off of one of our cisco devices as to total network traffic for each IP in our internal network. Will either of those two options you mentioned do this?

yasirirfan

Well you can also configure MRTG even for Cisco Switches for each and single port which gives u a graph for bandwidth consumption for each individual port.since u don't want to use solor winds I think this a better option. Bu MRTG works on SNMP hence u won't get graph based on IP address rather on mac address.

cheers

Yasir

vak73

Allied Admin:

If you are also looking at commercial software, you can check NetFlowAnalyzer and OpUtils from AdventNet. While OpUtils is similar to MRTG, where the details are retrieved through SNMP, the NetFlow Analyzer uses the NetFlow, Sflow, Netstream. cflow, J-Flow, IPFIX technologies that are supported by various switch vendors. You will be able to get IP Address-based or Application-based bandwidth utilization.

Cheers

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netnounours

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