Measuring Effect of Video Stream on the Network

[nojpt]

Hi,

We are a cisco country on my office and our HR Dept wanted to deploy Video Streaming as part of their information campaign which targeting our employees as audience.

They already have this sample video they want to stream, but my problem is that, i don't have a way to measure it's effect on our network.

Considering we have over 3000 employees, i'm worried it may bring down the network if the video becomes popular.

Is there any way that i would be able to benchmark bandwidth usage of video stream and be able to generate sort of an official looking report? Does any software do this? Can cisco devices be able to capture and report this traffic?

Thanks for the help!

[cisco_lad2004]

Hi

Alternatively, you could deploy and rely on QOS to ensure stream does not eat up the whole network.

use a network wide policy that simply limits ur Video to a certain % of available BW.

you can also benchmark and forecast safely by enabling a smaller segment to start with monitor then enable a larger area etc..by then you would have had a feel for the effects.

At the end of the day the BW your source is streaming will remain the same until it hits the duplication points which are the closest devices to the viewers.

HTH

Sam

[nojpt]

Hi Sam,

Any idea how to monitor this accurately?

Thanks!

[cisco_lad2004]

Hi

It depends which tool you have. somethimng like MRTG would give you a very good graphs on BW utilisation as well as CPU spikes.

else , you can just take readings urself using sh proc cpu, sh interfaces, ( checking for utilisation and drops). if u decide to enable QOS, you can use sh policy map interface X/X

so there a few options, depends what you have available.

HTH

Sam