We are a large company based in Ireland with a 40 site MPLS Network
from BT Ireland. Link speeds vary from 128KB to 2MB. All sites connect
via Cisco routers onto an Ethernet backbone. We use 3Com switches in
all sites for LAN connectivity.

We regularly get performance issues on some lines. Our inivestigation
is limited to getting line utilisation statistics from BT - not great
are they are averaged over the 24 hour period and so always
underestimate the utilisation %. We also ask BT to give us IP
Accounting information but as this is only 'switched on' for a period,
we cannot use to analyse historical issues (e.g. earlier today etc.).

Can you tell me what software/hardware solutions (top 5, good value
products etc.) we should consider to help properly (i) analyse WAN
traffic, and (ii) do capacity planning on lines i.e. trending of
utilisation over our working day and trending of traffic on lines by
application.

Specifically, we want to be able to :

- get real utilisation on our lines over our working day (ie. not
averaged over 24 hours)
- get analysis of what applications (e.g. word, excel, AS/400 traffic,
Lotus notes etc.) and traffic types (IP, netbios etc.) are loading our
lines
- who is loading our lines (i.e. what IP conversations are going on
over a time period)

We need to be able to run all above reports flexibly and historically
(e.g. to investigate the performance issue yesterday beween 2-3pm
etc.)

Thanks & Regards

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Request for Question Clarification by theta-ga on 27 Aug 2006 14:06 PDT

Hi ithead-ga,
    I have collected a list of the popular WAN traffic analysis
solutions, and was wondering what level of information you are
expecting for these products. Would a link to the product description,
and an external review for each of the products be enough?
    If you can provide me your expectation, I can update my list and
post it as the answer.
Thanks,
Theta-ga
:)

---

Clarification of Question by ithead-ga on 29 Aug 2006 08:51 PDT

Hi !

Would like a review of each of the key products, list of key
functionality, cost indication, name of where we can purchase in
Ireland (and/or UK), your view of level of expertise needed to manage
internally within IT (ie. how expert an IT specialist do we need),
ideally names of some large companies using the software in
Ireland/UK, and links to the relevant web sites/brochure links.

Thanks & Regards.

---

Clarification of Question by ithead-ga on 31 Aug 2006 01:19 PDT

PS Could you also indicate which WAN management products provide
broader functionality above performance management and capacity
planning i.e. can any of the products help document your network  by
sniffing our devices (routers, switches, PC's ?) and create a netwok
diagram which can be kept or exported to visio etc.

Thanks

If you only want to show the bandwidth usage status(white live chart &
history chart), not deep into application level, MRTG (The Multi
Router Traffic Grapher) is a good choice.

MRTG link: http://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg/

Demo: http://www.stat.ee.ethz.ch/mrtg/  (click the chart could show
the history chart)

On the other hand, unless you install an agent on each PC, otherwise
you can not show which application usage the bandwidth, that is not a
cost effective solution.

In my point of view, I will suggest to monitor the Port/Protocal, eg:
Lotus Notes use the 1352 port / Outlook use the 25 port / IE use the
80 port, that you could split the traffic by different port/protocal.

all your requirements can be met easily.. .try this,
 
- enable netflow on your cisco router WAN interface (ie. ip route-cache flow)
- verify network is collecting data on the router (show ip cache flow)

- take a look at this product..
(http://www.develcon.com/nms/netflow.html) or any other similar
netflow monitoring tools..
- configure the monitoring tools to poll the cisco router via snmp

cheers,
jit. CCIE 13748