logging used bandwidth vs external bandwidth

[gentianhila]

Here is my situation: We have a contract with an ISP that is providing very bad service and internet speed goes up and down intermitently so it is hard to prove it to them. I have a Cisco ASA 5510 that tells me the bandwidth that we are using and sometimes I see we're not using most of our bandwidth (2 T1). But when I do a speedtest (Speakeasy) - I see that the speed is extremely slow.

I was wondering if there is a tool, free or not that would record the bandwidth that is being used from Cisco ASA (or a Cisco router 2600 series) vs the external speed at the time. Sampling the bandwidth at regular 1, 2 or 5 minutes intervals would be ideal and record the information somewhere.

We've talked to ISP (which is Cornerstone - http://www.cornerstonetelephone.com) but they would not admit that there is something wrong. We have tripple checked our devices and they are fine. I need somehow to prove to them - what a weird ISP. I can't wait to get out of the contract from them. I have heard other companies that are with them that had problems. Two were lucky as their contract expired.

Please help - any suggestion is very highly appreciated.

[Giuseppe Larosa]

Hello Gentian,

first of all to measure performance you need to send test traffic and to collect it somewhere.

So this kind of tests is intrusive because they need to use the BW resources of the link.

Said this there are a couple of tools that can run on linux boxes.

You need to deploy them in a pair of boxes one should be somewhere on the internet.

the tools are netperf and iperf.

see

http://www.freebsd.org/projects/netperf/index.html

linux version

http://www.boutell.com/lsm/lsmbyid.cgi/000005

http://linux.wareseeker.com/free-netperf-2.4.0-rc2/

for iperf

http://www.citynet.net/iperf/iperfXP.pdf

(it mentions also MS windows boxes)

So you can run the test from time to time but not continously.

Hope to help

Giuseppe