Tracking Down Port Utilization

[Rory_Schmitz]

Hello,

I've just downloaded an evaluation of Management Center (NetSight) and I'm trying to track down port utilization for all ports during a specific period of time. We've been having our Internet Bandwidth spike before business hours and trying to determine where it's coming from.

I already have 'Collect Device Statistics' and 'Collect Interface Statistics' set to History and I am seeing stats being generated. I plan on doing this on all of our devices today so I can have stats on Monday morning when the issue happens again.

How can I get a nice overview of high utilization ports in one report or graph? I figured reporting would be the best way to do this, but maybe not? Is there a better way to see historical data vs. real-time (raw) data taking place?

Thank you.

Rory

[Rory_Schmitz]

Thank you both! Looks like I have some more configuration to do with one of those open source options and sflow. We're a mix of Extreme Summit X400 series and X600 series, as well as Cisco's 3560\3750's that will be replaced with Extreme in the next couple of months. By Summer, we're hoping to be 100% Extreme.

We also looked into SolarWinds, but appeared to be quite a bit more expensive than Management Center.

And just so I understand, does Management Center not have support for sflow?

[EtherMAN]

Rory, As Jeremy says Netsight polling interval is a bit long. We use Cacti which is also open source and poll about 10,000 interfaces once every 5 minutes and keep 90 days of granular data. Jeremy also mentioned netflow. You did not mention what type of switches you have and if you have XOS switches then you must use sflow and not netflow. Sflow is built into the hardware so it does not affect your switch performance and there are open source collectors that you can use that will show you at IP level where your internet bandwidth is being used. I have used one before http://www.inmon.com/products/sFlowTrend.php and it is free.... You are limited to number of devices and how long the data is retained... Two years ago we invested in Solarwinds and sorry it is not cheap but for us having a mixed bag of switches and routers and vendors it has become an important tool we use daily.

[Jeremy_Gibbs]

I believe the interface polling is between 10 and 15 minutes. You can manually adjust the interface polling to one minute to get more granular, however that may put excessive load on the switch stack and or netsight server. To get a more real-time interpretation of your bandwidth, try reasherching netflow.

Also, I use observium. It's free and lets you view port bandwidth in real time as well as graphing it. It's open source with a paid subscription. The 100% free fork off that is LibreNMS.