Network Bandwith Monitoring: Any ideas?

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pcbananas

Weaksauce
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Jan 26, 2007
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Hello!

We currently run a small network of 250 users connected through 5 cisco catalysts switches throughout the building. All traffic runs through our two 6500 cisco switches that run in parallel. We wanted to monitor network bandwidth because we have been experiencing bandwidth problems affecting mostly internet traffic. We have a DS3 line for our internet traffic.

Any suggestions on network monitoring software, appliances, or solutions would be appreciated. Unfortunately, we have a limited budget for whatever is left for this year and we wanted to pin point the problem ASAP.


Thank you!

Christian
 
So since it's all Cisco gear you should have ANMP turned on.. You could use Cacti, Nagios or if you prefer a commercial windows solution Solarwinds. Orion is the one that runs as a service ($2475 for 100 elements), but you can get similar functionally with the engineers toolset $999, that includes similar monitoring tools, but they don’t run as a service.
 
May want to check out cacti. Can use it to gather bandwidth usage information from those switches vis SNMP I believe.
 
I use Solarinwds Orion to monitor 1200+ Cisco devices in 60 different remote locations. This app replaced our CiscoWorks and HP NNM. I have no regrets switching to a Orion. It is very easy to setup and very customizable compared to our old monitoring apps. Check out www.thwack.com , that's Solarwinds messageboard.

If you wanna go with the Solarwinds route, Orion will give you up/down monitoring, alerts, maps, hostorical stats of interface util, discards, error etc. If you need to breakdown by protocol they have an add-on NetFlow module. I find this addon lacking compared to NetQoS's Netflow Traffic analyzer.
 
You could use zenoss. We use zenoss for monitoring about 150 devices and cacti for the graphing. I started in zenoss v1.1.1 and graphing was a little tough but now with 2.1.0 it seems to be somewhat better but take a look at both, you can run both on the same box, doesn't really requre stupid amounts of processing power if you are just monitoring the switches but you can also monitor servers and such, anything that has snmp ability.

(PS both are free, just the hardware is needed).

1200 devices on orion...wow, money bags.
 
Karandras69 said:
You could use zenoss. We use zenoss for monitoring about 150 devices and cacti for the graphing. I started in zenoss v1.1.1 and graphing was a little tough but now with 2.1.0 it seems to be somewhat better but take a look at both, you can run both on the same box, doesn't really requre stupid amounts of processing power if you are just monitoring the switches but you can also monitor servers and such, anything that has snmp ability.

(PS both are free, just the hardware is needed).

1200 devices on orion...wow, money bags.
Click to expand...

Thank you for the information! We would like to analyze traffic by protocol and be able to find the specific device (Workstation) slowing down our network. Ex: TCP on port 80 and find the port on the Cisco router where the machine taking most of the bandwidth is located.

Of course, we understand there are several other features with the applications you mentioned as well as Solarwinds Orion. We have a budget of $1,200 and we want something that doesn't require a mirroring port. I have tried NetFlow Analyzer and I'm about to download NetProbe 2.5. I will try your suggestion too.
 
netflow is the way to go for your requirements.

I'm a big fan of manageengine's netflow analyzer. Support is so so, but the app is great.
NetQOS is nice too, but at about 10x the cost.

Where is your firewall in all this? it should be able to show you things...
 
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