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Monitor Traffic On Specific PCs

Greetings!

I have recently begun a trial of Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor and NetFlow Traffic Analyzer for my organization. I've been using the software for a couple days but haven't found an exact answer for our specific needs. I did perform a brief search of these forums as well but didn't find a closely matching answer.

The problem:

We have a fleet of telepresence workstations, servers and endpoints. The workstations and servers are all on the same LAN connected via layer 2 switches (no VLANs). Some of the endpoints are on different networks accessible via routers, some of the endpoints are on the same LAN as the workstations and servers. There have been times when the quality of service between the workstations and endpoints have been severely degraded. We believe that bandwidth usage between the servers/workstations/endpoints may be a problem. We need a way to monitor the traffic volume between the endpoints, the workstations and associated servers. Since we do not have VLANs, Layer 3 switches, or routers between most of the equipment NetFlow output probably won't help us much to gain end to end traffic analysis.

The question:

Will Orion Agents installed on the servers and workstations give us visibility into bandwidth utilization? Also things like average packet transmission/reception/etc... times? If so, is there a guide that would walk us through setting this type of agent up? One thing to keep in mind is that an agent would not be able to be installed on the telepresence endpoints.

Thank you for your time and consideration reading this!

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Accepted answers

All comments

bobmarley

Anything going layer 3, you should be able to get netflow info for so it's worth a look. You could also monitor the activity of all of the switchports with NPM if you think it is related to high utilization. Netpath might give you some results as well.

darragh.delaney

Hi kitchenshark

If your switches don't have NetFlow features or if you don't see the traffic going via L3 routers you may be able to use a SPAN or mirror port off the switches. So long as they are managed you should be able to set one up. If you are not sure just let me know what type of switches you use and I will see if I have the configuration guide for them. Typically you would setup the SPAN\Mirror port on the core switch and mirror the Internet gateway, router connections and important servers.

Once you have the SPAN\Mirror port setup you need access to a network traffic analyzer. SolarWinds have a Quality of Experience feature built into NPM or you could try a third party tool like our own LANGuardian which can then integrate with your SolarWinds tools. More in this video to give you an idea as to what can be done, just an Internet monitoring example but it can cover LAN, WAN and Internet traffic.

Hope this helps,

Darragh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbFN_lGZ6jw

kitchenshark

Thank you both for your answers. I think I need to clarify my question. Long story short: We can't modify the switch settings to enable or disable anything.

Will an Orion agent installed on a PC send information collected on all that PC's traffic to the Solarwinds NPM or NTA components?

TerryHarding

The Orion Agent will only allow you to report on bandwidth utilisation of the interface. You could install nProbe software (www.ntop.org/products/netflow/nprobe) on the PC / Server to generate NetFlow data to send to the NTA module?

familyofcrowes

The agent will not provide netflow data. BUT, with the agent you can see the interfaces statistics such as errors, data rates like bps, pps and you can chart this over time....

example:

aLTeReGo

nProbe can be used to send flow data from those devices to NTA.