Can the CISCO PIX 515e monitor bandwidth?

[clinthammer]

We have a small network of 25 users (running Win XP Pro and MAC OS 10) all connected to the Internet throught a PIX 515e firewall.

We don't own any router or switches. The ISP leased line - well the ISP owns the router so I can't touch it. Also, we don't plan to buy any additional hardware for this network monitoring task.

Basically, we have 15gb of bandwidth per month and always exceed it by a lot. e.g. From 1feb to today, we have used 7gb. I need to track the Internal user who is eating up our bandwidth.

Can I do this on the PIX firewall and if so, how?

I appreciate any info given as this is an imp task which is really killing our finances.

Thank you.

CD

[8dstaicu]

enable pix authentication and accounting

[clinthammer]

Thank you but I'm also sorry.

My PIX knowledge is pretty limited so can you please elaborate.

I can provide part of our firewall config if necessary.

[Glenn Hanratty]

Rather than try to do this through a PIX...why don't you just put a sniffer on your local LAN and just watch the top senders/receivers....chances are you've got some audio/video streaming going on and that uses lots of packets...just my 2 cents.FWIW

Glenn

[Zapperlink]

Yeah it might be more worth your money to set a host up to monitor the traffic and check two things. The protocol counts and where they are going. Also if your in control of the network check for any FTP servers as your users might have those which sometimes can consume a lot depending on what is on them.

Simplified:

- Set host on network to monitor all traffic for a 3 days to a week.

- Narrow it down to who is using it.

- Check to see what traffic they are producing. Is it video? Is it a FTP server? Are your clients allowed to run any services?

- Follow up with customer based on policy violations or a request to lower bandwidth usage.