We have DSL internet (6 mbps download/600 kbps upload) in our office. We have around 30 users with internet access. I would like to know what is the best way to monitor the bandwidth utilization. I want to know which users are using more bandwidth than others also should be able to genearate reports. I would like to know if anyone has used tools or apps to monitor their bandwidth. I highly appreciate any repsonses..
Thank you in advance, Hemal
I use PRTG for this very thing. You'll need a switch that supports port mirroring/spanning. If your switch does support port mirroring/spanning then you can install PRTG on a monitoring host, configure the switch to mirror the firewall/uplink port traffic to the monitoring host port, set up a packet sniffer sensor in PRTG and voila. You'll be able to see bandwidth utilization, traffic reports, traffic by host, protocol, traffic by conversation, etc. PRTG also has reporting capability.
One of the easiest ways is to set up a proxy (I'd recommend squid on a linux server) , and have all internet traffic go through that. There are then various ways of authenticating and identifying users. I guess the easiest would be to have a transparent proxy (so users don't need to set it in their web browsers), then set each user pc to have a static IP address. Then you can use applications like sarg or webalizer (if you use squid) to analyse the proxy logs and get quite detailed reports of who does what when where and how... Might upset some users though.
If users use different computers or share, then you would need to look into authentication methods. You can link squid with ldap (active directory), but then the proxy can't be transparent (as far as I know)
Hope that helps
