Create Date: Nov 15 2012 4:41PM
In my experience, cacti and MRTG have underreported utilization more than the console session has. I didn't build the cacti config so I can't vouch for its correctness, but on a bursty link that carries a true average of 200Mbps shows up as about 50Mbps in cacti/MRTG no matter what, and 150 at the console unless it's sustained (the longer it's sustained at a given speed the more correct the console gets.) Each of these tools is showing data that's sampled then averaged, like the poster above said, so it's a matter of how exact you want to get. If you need the most accurate numbers, you need to sample more frequently. (from Ansley_Barnes)