Who's using all the bandwidth?! Need Monitor app...

[ame540]

Hello!

I am at my wits end with this one. We have one subnet that has all of our LAN computers and servers. The problem is that randomly something or someone will start downloading a huge patch or start streaming a big video file and chew up all of our bandwidth.

I need an application that will show me graphically in real time, which computers or servers are using all of our bandwidth. Everything comes to a standstill at these times.

Network Instruments?
Paessler?

I'm looking for something relatively easy to setup. It can run on a PC if it has to, or we can pull packet data from the cisco router at the end of our T1. It makes no difference to me, i'm just looking for something easy to setup and manage. In the meantime im going to lookinto why our QoS settings don't seem to be doing what they are supposed to. Anyone have any suggestions about what program might suit my needs?

 

[North323]

check out blue coat traffic shaper

 

[ame540]

Cool device, but i'm not looking to buy an appliance if its possible to avoid it.

 

[North323]

you are going to need some device inline or transparent to catch the packets. im sure you can add a linux device with a few ports and put on some application

 

[pansophic]

You may want to take a look at

http://www.wareprise.com/2009/01/14...ng-tools-to-monitor-your-network-and-servers/

for some open-source solutions for monitoring networks.

My first thought was MRTG, but I can't recall whether you can identify the specific machine that is generating the traffic or just the existence of traffic on that router interface. You can probably configure the servers such that you can execute SNMP queries on their interface traffic and get it down to the specific machine.

Good luck!


pansophic

 

[burtsbees]

It depends on how QoS is set up---that will tell why it may not be working correctly. You can rate limit with CAR, policy maps, etc., monitor your traffic in the Cisco with Netflow, ip accounting, NBAR, access-list matches, etc. You can SPAN ports in the switch and Wireshark the traffic to see the specific ip addresses of the culprit machine/machines.

Burt