Top tools for monitoring bandwidth 2013 - 2014

This is the 56th article in the Spotlight on IT series. If you'd be interested in writing an article on the subject of backup, security, storage, virtualization, mobile, networking, wireless, DNS or MSPs for the series PM Eric to get started.

Every day there are numerous SpiceHeads asking about how to monitor and trend bandwidth utilization and traffic — with free or paid tools. This is useful information. To help these and others like them select the right tools to achieve their goals in a better and easier way, I’ve compiled a list of my favorite tools.

This is, of course, my opinion. I may be wrong, but I believe these tools can help every IT guy. Here are my top five personal favorite solutions.

1. Untangle Bandwidth Control
   Cost: 14-day free trial / $270 for 1 year for 1-10 PCs
   What is does: Bandwidth Control allows administrators to control and visualize network usage at a fine-grained level. Features include the ability to assign data transfer quotas, guarantee bandwidth, punish unauthorized usage, and prioritize and de-prioritize sites.
2. Cacti
   Cost: Free
   What is does: Cacti is a complete RRDTool-based graphing solution. It stores all of the necessary information to create graphs and populate them with data in a MySQL database. The frontend is completely PHP driven. Along with being able to maintain Graphs, Data Sources, and Round Robin Archives in a database, Cacti handles the data gathering. There is also SNMP support for those used to creating traffic graphs with MRTG.
3. Splunk
   Cost: Download for free. Enterprise features available for 60 days — index up to 500 MB of data a day. After 60 days, convert to a perpetual Free license or purchase an Enterprise license to continue using expanded functionality.
   What is does: Splunk collects, indexes and harnesses the machine data generated by your IT infrastructure. Troubleshoot, investigate security incidents, monitor end-to-end infrastructure to avoid service degradation or outages and more.
4. OpManager
   Cost: The Free Edition supports 10 devices, and a single user and features basic monitoring functionality. Various editions are available. Pricing is based on number of devices. A 30-day free trial is available for all editions.
   What it does: OpManager is network monitoring software that offers fault and performance management functionality across IT resources such as routers, WAN links, switches, firewalls, VoIP call paths, physical servers, virtual servers, domain controllers and more.
5. BandwidthD
   Cost: Free
   What is does: BandwidthD tracks usage of TCP/IP network subnets and builds HTML files with graphs to display utilization. Charts are built by individual IP.

For more details about these tools and many others, visit my full how-to article: Bandwidth Monitoring Free & Paid Tools Software Details. (Credit for this idea goes to Jay6111, whose great how-to post Resolving scan errors, Unknowns, and no open ports in inventory inspired my list.)

By using these tools, you can do advanced user monitoring, protection against data leaks, inventory of hardware and software, and proactive network monitoring. Some have great reports and graphs that help you visualize your network. Some of the tools have various miscellaneous utilities like SNMP tester, sFlow Tester, WMI Tester, etc.

The right tools for the right job

A little bit about my company: We’ve been associated with the auto parts manufacturing industry for the last four decades. We have 288 workstations within the country; various branches are connected with point-to-point connectivity and several users are connected by VPN. We have central physical servers and data centers installed in the head office with one VM. We are using various Linksys switches, Cisco routers and hardware firewalls, so it is easy to monitor all these by using the tools I’ve listed.

We have hosted email servers. We’re using a UK-based ERP software (we’ll move on to SAP in future). We have VOIP implemented within all connected branches. Lots of users enter their data online, so we monitor the issues and resolve them by using these tools successfully.

Out of my entire list of tools, right now we use Untangle, Manage Engine and Cacti the most. We also like PRTG Network Monitor a lot. Its bandwidth control option, site-prioritizing option and quotas options are good. We also use Manage Engine OpManager for performance monitoring of one virtual server in our other branch. Right now it’s good for one VM, but I think it will be good for more than one — its a new branch and because of the growing network, we’ll have to make another VM on that =)

OpManager offers three editions. Essential Edition is designed for the small and medium size enterprises. Enterprise Edition is, obviously, for large enterprises. Free edition only supports 10 devices.

We using the free version of Splunk as it is sufficient as for our needs. I’ve seen its paid version at another company. It has features like monitoring and alerting, access controls, distributed support and enterprise support options, which are not included in the free version.

We’re testing Nagios now and we hope that to implement it as per our organization needs and budget.

Free or paid?

There is a bit of difference between what you can get for free and pay. Sometimes we have seen that the features of the paid (commercial) tools did not included in the free tools so people prefer free tools unless it is necessary to buy paid tool. Some organizations do because of their budget others do because of its options, so as you can see that I included both free and paid tools details in my how-to.

The big advantage of the paid tools is the support, which you can get at one call and which is sometimes not available when you use free tools. On the other hand, you can get updates for your paid software that can resolve its bugs or can offer you value added options. Both can be useful, but it depends on your needs.

Last but not least, if you have any suggestions of other valuable tools, I’d be happy to add them to my list. It’s my pleasure to share my thoughts in this Spotlight on IT Series.

http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/222989-top-5-mostly-free-tools-for-monitoring-bandwidth

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4 tools for checking bandwidth 2013-2014

The question of whether you're getting the bandwidth you pay for is one that just doesn't go away. Twice in the last few months I've suspected my ADSL connection of running slow and, sure enough, despite the modem telling me I had 3Mbps down and 500Kbps up, for whatever reason, restarting the modem fixed the problem.

I personally blame AT&T for not cleaning the bits as they route them to me and because of that my modem is getting a build-up of digital residue.

But testing your connection isn't hard; you can, for instance, use a service like Speedtest.net published by Ookla and let them do the work.

Ookla's Flash-based app figures out where on the 'Net you are, which of their test servers are nearest you based on ping time, and then uploads and downloads large files to measure throughput accompanied by cute graphics (which shows what looks remarkably like a man peeing on a pyramid ... but I digress).

Speedtest.net tests your connection throughput using a man peeing on a pyramid.

As you can see from the screenshot, my download and upload performance figures are roughly in the expected ranges, though the scorecard (see image) rather depressingly tells me my connection gets a rating of D-minus and is slower than 77% of other U.S. connections.

Speedtest.net scorecard

Speedtest.net also has a free iPhone app (which is iPad compatible) that does much the same thing but obviously not using Flash (in case you're not aware, Apple doesn't allow Flash to run on iOS for a number of good reasons, including stability and security issues as well as the fact that Steve Jobs loathed Flash).

Speedtest.net for iOS running on an iPad

The iOS version of Speedtest.net looks much slicker than the Web-based version and, unlike the Web-based version, you can choose which test server to use. Curiously, the app consistently gives slightly lower throughput values which is, I suspect, due to performance issues with bulk data transfers over Wi-Fi (the interface also has an "easter egg" ... "pull down" on the meter when not running a test to see a demonic-looking kitty).

The few reviews of this app complain that it isn't accurate, but I found it to be in reasonable agreement with its online sibling.

The Speedtest.net iOS app reports consistently lower throughputs probably due to Wi-Fi.

Another connection performance test app I like for its presentation is Speedtest X HD (there's a free version and a Pro version for $0.99) published by Veeapps, which also appears to yield similar results to the other tools already covered.

With Speedtest X HD you can select which server to use (a few of them are only available with the Pro version) and it provides an interesting display of global performance stats. You can also add your server, though what's involved in this is not explained in the app or on their site which is, as of this writing, broken. This makes me hesitant to recommend the paid version.

Speedtest X HD running on an iPhone

Of course you have to be careful of casting aspersions on your ISP's service when using these tools as they will only give accurate results if your connection isn't being used by any other applications or services. This is where cloud services can fool you as many run in the background and, while they may adapt to changing bandwidth usage by throttling themselves, they'll still make your connection look slower than it actually is.

A few weeks ago I wrote about AppNeta and their multi-site WAN and LAN performance management suite and how they used a fascinating technique called Packet Dispersion Analysis to test and characterize network connections.

To refresh you: Packet Dispersion Analysis sends a sequence of small packets of varying sizes and configurations to a test server and back again. By analyzing how these packets are delayed and routed by the network it's possible to determine the latency, the available bandwidth (or "headroom"), the actual bandwidth used, and how well certain protocols (such as VoIP) perform.

The beauty of this technique is that Packet Dispersion Analysis requires only a tiny fraction of the available bandwidth to work (with AppNeta this is only 20 small packets) so it can be run while routine network operations are in progress without causing any noticeable bandwidth impact. 

AppNeta's PathTest iOS app running on an iPad

AppNeta has just released a new free iOS tool called PathTest that uses the Packet Dispersion Analysis technique and which appears to give more accurate results than any of the other tools I've tried (what is consistence are my upload speeds, while download speeds, where Wi-Fi is the "last mile" -- OK, last few meters, but you get my point -- are subject to more complex network effects and so appear to vary more).

While this may not be the sexiest user interface compared to the others in this column PathTest provides far more detail and more accurate results. A future update of PathTest promises to scan your local network and automatically find and save PathTest targets. PathTest has to be my favorite connection performance test I've found for iOS so far and gets a Gearhead rating of 5 out of 5.

http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/2013/031313-gearhead.html?page=1

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