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Monitor Internet Connection Bandwidth

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by ratherbfishing 1 view

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Can anyone sugggest a utility to monitor Internet bandwidth from our DSL connection? Our set up is like this: DSL Router---->hub---->firewall--->LAN.

I can find all kinds of utilities for monitoring bandwidth to my PC, but I need to actually monitor the DSL connection at the router or possibly external firewall interface. The DSL router does not have snmp and is supplied by our ISP.

Thanks

5 replies

by politzerb

You are limited without SNMP. Here are a couple of approachs.
1) Look into an option on your firewall. Many support throughput reporting and/or an SNMP module that you can monitor remotely.
2) Put a notebook or PC running sniffer software on thehub between the DSL router and the firewall. The hub should repeat all traffic to the sniffer port. The collected data can show you average utilizations.
3) Replace the hub with a manageable switch. Use an SNMP monitor to the switch port connected to the DSL router.

by ratherbfishing

Thanks for your help. I believe in my situation answer 2 below will work withour having to replace any hardware.

by jayanth

Well, to answer you queries, you will need to provide me some answers :-)
For all you m/c on the network in persume that your Firewall is the Gateway, right? If so, is it a hardware or software based firewall. If hardware based, then it should haveSNMP support. If siftware based, then whether its on Win NT/2K OR Linux, these OS's support SNMP services. You will have to install SNMP support for Win NT/2K.

Once you manage to enable the SNMP support on your firewall, then you can start monitoring its External/Outgoing Interface for your Internet Traffic. Use MRTG (Multi Router Traffic Grapher) (www.mrtg.org) which is a freeware tool, to do this. Its quite easy to setup and manage and gives the bandwidth utilization in neat graphical representation. Before using MRTG, be sure that your system has PERL installed. The MRTG website, www.mrtg.org, has well documented steps to perform all you need.

Check these things and get back :)

by ratherbfishing

Firewall is software on NT box. I believe the MRTG solution will work for us, in fact I recall hearing some ohter good reports about MRTG.

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