Monitoring bandwidth usage of a 256K leased line

[blakem]

Hi,

I've got a 256K leased line, and I want to monitor the bandwidth usage so that I know if I'm nearing the limit. I'd like to know when I hit 80% regularly.

I haven't chosen any hardware yet, but could use a catalyst switch, IOS router or sniffer to capture the packets.

Which one would you recommend? I was thinking a CatOS with SPAN, but then need to configure a sniffer too. Is there a simple way I can measure KB/s on a cisco router/switch?

Many thanks,

michael

[royalblues]

Hi Michael,

You can use network management softwares like MRTG & Solarwinds which can even trigger an alert when a certain threshold is reached.

check them out here

http://www.mrtg.com/

http://www.solarwinds.net/

HTH

Narayan

[dpopli]

Hi Mike,

As mantioned by Narayan you can use MRTG to monitor bandwidth. However if you are looking for managing bandwidth and recoganizing Applications utlizing bandwidth you can use NBAR, Netflow or Packetshaper

Cheers