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Rookie needing a little direction

I am the network admin of a small 70 person company. We have not focused much on what goes across our network in the past. We have to change this because of multiple problems happening from over use of our bandwidth. I am having a tough time hunting down the user who randomly eats our bandwidth to death. I have a dell PowerConnect 6248 that I do not think is adequate for hunting down the user. I am interested in using netflow to hunt this user down. Can someone recommend a good switch to do this.

Thanks

Ben

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chickendog

Do all Cisco Switches support netflow?

Donald_Francis

Most switches from Cisco (or anyone else that I know of) do not support netflow. You will generally only find it in the larger chassis switches. However it is a feature in all of the routers.

However there are other things you can do. You can pick a point in your network where most traffic passes and span a switch port and send that to a probe which can then convert that into flows to send to solarwinds.

chickendog

Thanks so much for your time in replying. Can you elaborate a little on what a probe is. I know that the dell 6248 does port mirroring (which I believe is the same as “span a switch port”).

I do appreciate your time.

Ben

bshopp

These two blog posts should help you out

Miron

Hi,

I am not sure how your network is logically structured, however because of the small number of users i would assume that you are in a single location with a single internet gateway. The gateway is possibly the best place to place a device capable of reporting usage by ip address. This device could be something like a good quality router Cisco/Juniper which has at its simplest the ability to report on top10 talkers or netflow. If you already have a router in place or you dont manage your router then you may wish to try something like a low end packeteer/netenforcer type device which will show you now only who is the top talker but also what applications they are using. These are obviously off-the-shelf products that can assist and it depends on whether your budget meets the business requirement.

You may find that your bandwidth hog may actually be using the bandwidth for valid business usage.(or not)

Miron

chickendog

I am leaving for vacation in about an hour. I have not had time to do some of these suggestions yet, but i did want to thank you all for your replies. Thanks.

netlogix

when you say bandwidth, do you mean LAN or WAN/Internet bandwidth? if it's LAN, you could use NPM (or engineer tool set) and monitor every port to look to see what port is the culprit, then back trace that to a computer. WAN/Internet would need to look at the router/firewall with a span/netflow like everyone else is saying.