If your firewall supports SNMP I would say take a look at Cacti. It won't control the bandwidth but will graph it out for you (great for long term trending). Can also set up monitors for the CPU as well as the 95% depending on the billing package your set up on. You will also be able to monitor the Cisco Switch ports, added bonus.
If you need to actually control the amount of traffic look to the firewall for rate limiting or some other throttling function. Lastly for VOIP might want to look at setting up QOS on your Cisco Switch to do traffic shaping and prioritization. http://www.cacti.net/ Thank you, Fred Sawyer Sunbelt Software ________________________________ From: kenw [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, January 28, 2008 9:48 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: Bandwidth management There is, actually, another solution. Since I presume you're interested in WAN bandwidth, there's really only one port you're interested in - the one that goes through your firewall. You could use a real network hub (a rare beast these days, be sure it's not a switch pretending to be a hub) to tap into the line feeding into your firewall. Watch that, if it's a dual-speed hub, your sniffer's NIC is set to the same speed as the port you're monitoring, or you still won't see the traffic because you'll be on the wrong side of the internal bridge. If you want more detail in the analysis, you could also consider WireShark (nee Ethereal) or Microsoft's new Netmon 3, which are free downloadable packet sniffers. /kenw From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: January-28-08 7:07 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: Bandwidth management Switches only send traffic to designated ports based on MAC address. You either need to configure the switch to a monitor port, where it basically sends a copy of all traffic so you can hook a machine to that port and see all traffic. From: Chyka, Robert [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, January 28, 2008 3:22 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: Bandwidth management If I want to use ntop to see what machines are talking the most on the network, do I need to configure a switch port any special way? It is a small flat switchednetwork. Thanks.. ________________________________ From: Benjamin Zachary [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, January 28, 2008 3:18 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: Bandwidth management Mrtg , ntop come to mind. Your vendor can normally provide some mrtg graphs to give you a general idea of usage and peak usage. ________________________________ From: Phil Guevara [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, January 28, 2008 2:42 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Bandwidth management What are people using to manage bandwidth? We want to up our bandwidth but put something in place to make sure the bandwidth is managed properly. We will be going VOIP soon and we currently have checkpoint firewalls. Also is this a good product? Any use it? http://www.netequalizer.com/nda.htm Thanks for your input and advice. Best Regards, Phil ~ Upgrade to Next Generation Antispam/Antivirus with Ninja! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbelt-software.com/SunbeltMessagingNinja.cfm> ~
