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Troubleshooting Help - Best Tool or Toolset

Greetings,

I am looking for a network monitoring product that can help me with a problem that I am having at the moment.

We have several sites that contact me on a regular basis complaining of the famous 'network is slow' problem. This morning I had a such a call and indeed using PRTG (http://www.paessler.com/prtg) I can see that that router from this site is saturated with traffic. In this case I usually contact my ISP (I am not allowed to touch their routers) and ask them what the problem is. They usually get back to me and tell me that the problem is such and such a PC etc etc downloading from this site etc.

My question is, is there such a tool in the toolset that can allow me to see this for myself? We have 2 to 3 Cisco swithes on each site and using the above program we can see that indeed there is traffic but where to and where it is coming from we dont know.

Can we use one of the tools in the toolset to monitor several ports on the swich to see this?

What are my options. I need to know if this is possible WITHOUT the use of extra hardware before i download

Thanks in advance if you can provide any assistance

Declan D

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nrms

Hi Declan,

Sounds like you migth get some benefit from the Network Traffic Analyser product, of which there is a free version.

NTA uses Cisco's Netflow system to provide details on flows of traffic between endpoints. Netflow takes a little configuring, but there is a Netflow Configurator in the Engineer's Toolset (not sure if there it is in the free version or not).

I think most Cisco devices (switches and routers) support Netflow, but you may want to check first.

Of course, there is some argument here that what you need to do is have a web proxy (or web proxies, depending on your setup) that can report on the internet usage of individual users if your main problems are internet download-related!

SteveSW

There is a Netflow configurator in the free version as well.

--HTH

Steve