How to get network usage statistics

[daniel wright_1]

what statistics do you want? cacti does errors, packet loss, discards, thoughput, B Cast and a few other IIRC, it wont breakdown the trafic usage though. will take a better look at sFlow though as the were just about to start replacing our existing procurves with 2848's and 3500s which both support sFlow.

[dj_farid]

Daniel,
sFlow gives some more statistics from all the different OSI layers. I am especially interested in how much of the total traffic is citrix generated, and if there are any p2p protocols in use.
Check out sflow.org.

[daniel wright_1]

i found two free programs at the weekend,
one would only allow you to connect to one switch at a time which was a bit rubbish but i also found

http://www.openxtra.co.uk/freestuff/nmap-xtra.php

nmap-extra (free windows version of nmap which is free for linux)

haven't had too much of a play as i dont have any sflow compatible devices at home but will be playing with it this morning at work.

let me know what you think.

[daniel wright_1]

^^
that should be ntop not nmap but theres a link on that page to ntop

[dj_farid]

I have been looking quickly at ntop too. I gave it up for the moment, looking for easier solutions.
Ntop looks promising though. The problem with it is to enable sflow in the switches. What I understood, it doesn't do it automatically. You have to do the SNMP SET commands to enbale sFlow by yourself.
It is not a huge problem to write a script to do it. But our both switches are quite critical in 24/7 operation. I rather not do any automatic SNMP hacking on them yet.
Anyway, this is how I think you do it: http://www.plixer.com/files/sFlow-ProCurve2800_and_5300.pdf

I could be completely wrong though, since I have not played around with it yet.

If anyone has any success stories, please share :-)