Realtime Bandwidth Monitoring

[psyllex]

That's encouraging. I'm surprised that their isn't a distro that is specialized for network performance measurement. I haven't looked, but I did work next door to iXia and took a factory tour, so I've seen what real network monitoring looks like. If you can get similar functionality with a few network cards, a PC and an instrumented kernel, then that would be helpful to the community. It's not a trivial problem when you start getting into the details.

What specifically are you trying to measure? What is the network topology? LAN performance, WAN performance? Website service requests?

Yeah I'm surprised as well....although to be honest I haven't really looked for a specific network performance monitoring distro. Specifically we are monitoring bandwidth...precisely bandwidth drop off when certain events happen...could be anything downloading a movie from netflix or what have you. The network is simple...14 dual core 64 bit 4 GB Ram machines (cache..I'm not sure). It's set up with 2 of the physical machines set up as servers, one as a monitor, 4 as firewalls, and 7 as bot/multiple purpose machines. We have Vlans set up between the vm routers and the firewalls with their own subnets and I believe about 8 vm routers...not sure on that. It's just a typical little lan set up. As for performance...I'm not sure yet...we're still setting everything up and I've only been monitoring my (monitoring) machine and a few vm remote hosts on my desktop. I believe we have 100Gbs switches but don't quote me on that...I'm the software guy....I"m still learning about this network stuff. But yeah it'll be a long term project for sure.. I have 3 servers here, plan on buying a couple more powerful ones to through VM's on. Then i'll setup with your typical server, vm routers and vlans type of topology (basically what I can find off Google search and actually do myself without screwing it up). Then I can dive into the kernel and see what I can find. I know a lot of the programs like ifstat get their data straight off the kernel (like..not specifically ifstat) so I plan on downloading their source code and then using that as a starting point. I'm sure 2-3 books will be read in there as well as many questions on forums. I think it's a worth-while cause though....real time bandwidth monitoring in graphical form...sounds good to me.

[Vishal Agarwal]

use iftop. It is good, I am using for a long time.

[psyllex]

use iftop. It is good, I am using for a long time.

I have that installed....no graphical interface with iftop...terminal only. My requirements need a graphical interface.

[psyllex]

I should say no graphical browser or standalone window display. Actually bmon has a sick tool...unfortunately it's in ASCII characters. But it works and its a decent tool. I aim to emulate something like that but one that does Ajax or some other kind of call from a browser to log files to get the data to a browser where I can make it look all pretty