Report on Top 10 Ethernet Talkers and Protocols They Used

[slade]

Hello, we are looking for a way to capture information such as what ip is using the most bandwidth, who are they talking to, and what protocol they are using.. without having to plug in a sniffer. Whats going has been a problem at several locations for some time. Someone sucks up all the bandwidth and we can't figure out who etc. What are the capabilities of rmon in regards to what I am looking to accomplish? Are there open source alternatives?

Thanks

[rmushtaq]

Not sure if there's an open source solution available for this. But nGenius RTM along with the Network Analysis Module (NAM)/Switch Probe can give you the information that you're looking for. NAM's own built-in Traffic Analyzer application can also do the same without using RTM, but it cannot do historical trending.

[4priedo]

Hi

have a look at http://www.mrtg.org. thats a snmp based freeware program (perl based) you can use to monitor all port utalisation very easy. Take the time to read the manuals! You can run the tool on windows or on Unix / Linux machines.

if you once have installed it you will see whitch switchports are have most utalisation.. (installation is easy and small)

MRTG will not search the highest util by itself, so if you have a lot of switches start at the Distribution Layer and then go down the tree until you find the Source of the huge amount of data sent.

regards Phil

[piotr.bulczak]

RMON is one option but I'm not sure if there are any open source tools handling it. I would propose to use netflow statistics. Just turn on netfow on your router and all required info (like top apps, top talkers and top conversations) can be pulled from the device. Good open source software for presenting such stats is Ntop. Another one is Flowscan.