Cisco 2950 and Bandwidth Monitoring

[Hagfish]

I've recently been tasked to find a way to prove that one of our new clients is eating up a bunch of bandwidth at our co-lo site.. Before we added them (and their dedicated server), we were at roughly 5 mb average, and now we've jumped to around 8..

The guy at the co-lo site said that I could monitor this by adding a cisco 2950 and monitoring the port for that server.. Today, I started researching MRTG and testing it out on some servers with SNMP installed.. My question is to those with more cisco experience than myself, and that is, will I get a lot more useful info by going with the 2950, rather than just using MRTG and SNMP on the actual server?

The bottom line is, I need to be able to show them that the bandwidth on the server is true internet traffic (not internal traffic), and be able to chart it, etc... Any suggestions are much appreciated.

 

[aletoledo]

I suppose it depends on how your network is setup.

You seem to be saying that their is a a distinction between internal traffic and internet traffic? That presumes you have several servers at your co-lo room and there is internal traffic between the server. If this is the case, there is already a switch in place, which likely will allow snmp traps for traffic statistics. a 2950 isn't any better for port statistics than any other switch.

If on the other hand, you only have a single physical server and are hosting different virtual servers or hosting different web servers, then you're going to need to use something on your server to different which server is generating the traffic. for a virtual server, like VMWare, there is usually builtin tools for this. For seperate web servers, I don't have any idea on monitoring seperate web servers on a single OS, but I'm sure some in a Microsoft forum would know better.

 

[helpdeskdan]

Yeah, it really does matter how it is setup. If you can plug every server it it's own port, then the 2950 AND MRTG would be the way to go. I've setup MRTG before and, as you can see, it's pretty neat. You can pull up a webpage with several different graphs and SHOW them who is using the bandwidth beyond a shadow of a doubt.

 

[Hagfish]

Well, it's an app server that I'm monitoring, and when someone hits if from the web, the app server sends a request to a DB through a private address also at the co-lo.. It's not a large transaction at all though, so I think the results I'm seeing in MRTG are actually quite accurate. They're averaging about 350 kb/s, which is much less than I was expecting.. looks like they're in the clear for now.. -- thanks for the responses