Re: SOHO-class user bandwidth monitoring

Kevin Kargel wrote:
>> Larry:
>>
>> That's a good idea.  Doesn't give you L7 info, but it's no-cost and tells
>> you which machine is generating the traffic.
>>
>> They have an issue where Internet traffic is occasionally slow and would
>> like to know what/who is causing that, plus they've been hit with a worm.
>>
>> I agree with your points on control. =)
>>
>> Frank
>>
> This is just my opinion - but nothing is free.  You can spend the money
> buying hardware that will take care of it or you can spend the money to have
> a netadmin set up snmp and a monitoring system and manage it.  
> 
> When the sun goes down you will probably have the same amount of money
> invested unless you consider your time as free.
> 
> What tips the balance is that if you do it with an internal snmp setup
> either the customer will need an educated netadmin on staff or you will be
> married to the project as a Chinese obligation.  Forever after anything that
> happens on their network will be your fault.  
> 
> Better to recommend that they either handle it themselves internally or that
> they purchase netflow capable edge devices.

Some years ago I did what I suggested, used MRTG as the collection and 
reporting tool, plugged it in and it just ran.  I did spend a little 
time making MRTG script and shell script modules but that was a one-time 
expense and I had to be there to listen to them whine anyway.

Every manager could look at the graphs for her machines and draw what 
ever conclusions she wanted to.

The hardest part was assembling the HTML to display the stuff in a 
meaningful (to the managers) way--hard because I didn't know how to 
generate HTML code except with vi (that I used for everything that I 
couldn't use sed or grep for).

It ran for several years after they fired me for being too old and 
finally got some expensive stuff installed to hide all the useful info 
from everybody.


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