internet monitoring

[trentosis]

ok heres the situation, we have several training rooms available for hire and we want to monitor traffic going to each room, each room is re-imaged every time a new class is in there so the computers rarely have the same IP, also computers are swapped around to different rooms. each room has a standard 16 port 10/100 switch which is linked to the patch panel and then linked to the main switch. All internet traffic is directed through a proxy server and then through the gateway onto the internet cloud. does anyone have any ideas of methods which could be used within a budget of around 2500
cheers.

 

[trentosis]

anyone?

 

[jepoybato]

What are you looking to monitor? Bandwidth, what sites/ports/etc the computers are accessing?

- Jepoy

 

[trentosis]

we are looking to monitor bandwidth, but we want to monitor each room individually setting up the monitor is easy its just we need a solution to monitoring each room without spending thousands of dollars

 

[Whoheard]

That is easy. You need to setup MRTG. It will monitor everything right down to the individual port stats. Look it up at:

http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/mrtg/

It is free and sets up in minutes.

bob

I know what I know and that's all I know.

 

[trentosis]

but we want to monitor traffic to each room , and each room does not always have the same pc's therefor we need to find a method to monitor all ctraffic coming from that room hub

 

[Whoheard]

Yes. That can be done as well. All you need to do is monitor the uplink port for each room switch on the main switch. MRTG will breakdown each port's traffic stats. If the device is SNMP enabled, MRTG will get the port stats off of it for you.

You can even get the individual PC themselves to provide stats to you.

MRTG is really simple to config, and you will have what you are looking for in a short period of time.

bob

I know what I know and that's all I know.

 

[Comstocb]

With the level of detail you have provided, I agree with Whoheard, MRTG is what you need, the switches just need to provide SNMP statistics.

Brian C.

 

[trentosis]

sounds ok Ill give it a try

 

[trentosis]

how do I get the switches to provide snmp stats do I need to buy new switches?

 

[trentosis]

ok i worked it all out but can anyone tell me if and how you differentiate the traffic e.g internal traffic from external, from my understanding switches run on layer 2 and can only send back mac addresses.

 

[Whoheard]

Without getting to complicated, and to keep it in your price range, you can take the stats off the main switch uplinks ports to all the room switches and bump them up against the uplink port to the internet. In the past, I have been able to follow moderate to large traffic patterns through the network.

Once you have MRTG up and running, you will be able to see what I am talking about. Since MRTG scales the graphs to the bandwidth usage rates, you can see the same pattern repeating itself through the network of switches and ports.

To answer the question previously: how do I get the switches to provide snmp stats do I need to buy new switches?

Depending on your switches: there type and age, you may have to buy new swithces. However, if they are fairly new, and of a respectable brand, you can configure the SNMP Community string settings on the switch itself. You will have to check and see if they are what they call a "Smart Switch," or "Intelligent Switch."

I would ask this first...Do the switches have IP addresses?

If they do, they would hopefully have a SNMP setting.

bob

I know what I know and that's all I know.

 

[trentosis]

im getting an snmpwalk problem any suggestions?

 

[Whoheard]

Yes. Check the SNMP community name or ip address in the command line. If it is wrong, then you will get this error. I have put them in backwards before.


I know what I know and that's all I know.