asked on

question about determing network load and bandwidth

I have a cisco ASA firewall, and have been tasked with determining our network load, how much bandwidth we use on a average basis, but I am not certain of how to accurately do this. I looked in the ASDM, but I am not certain of what I was looking for. I am really just looking to find our average throughput for a day.

luathas

You should be able to setup SNMP on the Pix and then monitor it with MRTG (http://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg/). MRTG would basically query the Pix firewall every 5 mins and give you a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly average. If you have manageable switches you can also setup monitoring of these devices as well. This can give you a break down of which device or group of devices is using the most bandwidth and can also help with trouble shooting if a workstation or server becomes compromised and you see a sudden increase in bandwidth.

Wayside_Tech

ASKER

That seems quite a lot to get it to work, there is nothing on the switch or firewall that is able to give statistics on this? i was thinking I could use cacti, but I didnt have it yet, and wondered if there was a cisco tool that i already had that I didnt know.