On Thursday, December 2, 2004, 14:04:38, Len Conrad wrote: >>Umm... perhaps I'm missing something but I don't see how one can >>determine "exactly how the WAN link is performing" from pinging and >>tracerouteing. > > easy. Congestion, steady state or transient, is shown by the millisecond > delay from mtr along the route to each hop.
But the only item of interest for "how the WAN link is performing" is the hop from your router to your ISPs. Ping/traceroute can only measure one protocol at a time. Its also subject to any rate limiting and other QoS limitations in effect at your or your ISPs router. > Sure, but not everybody who runs Imail has admin access to the local router > or Cisco command skills. True but everybody should be able to look at an MRTG graph and see the pretty coloured lines go up and down. > I'd be very surprised if the conclusions about the health of a route from > mtr stats and cisco stats would be totally different. I would expect them > to be identical, with mtr being much more accessible than cisco commands. But it doesn't give many hints as to why the WAN link is performing badly. If I see a high transmit or receive load that gives me different information than seeing a high number of CRC errors or overruns. > mtr shows packet counts and losses per node, ping round-trip-time > as min/avg/max per node. A quick and dirty and easy go/nogo tool. I'm not knocking it from that point of view, I'm all for quick, dirty and easy :-) I was just objecting to your "exactly how the WAN link is performing" phrase. Having MRTG in place also gives history so when someone says "I came in on Saturday and response time was terrible" you can see if there was a utilization spike at some point. Glancing at the graphs can also give an indication of increasing bandwidth needs so you've got time to start budgeting for an upgrade. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] "The avalanche has already started, it is too Rod Dorman late for the pebbles to vote." � Ambassador Kosh To Unsubscribe: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html List Archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ Knowledge Base/FAQ: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/IMail/
