Per Device Bandwidth Monitoring

[chakraps]

I work at a small organization and help manage our network needs. I'm by no means a network specialist. Just someone who graduated from home networking to helping out at the office. Our current topology is:

Leased Line Modem____
...............................|
..__________________|__________________________
|.......................................................................|
Firewall with Static IP-1.....................Router-A with Static IP-2 (WiFi-A)
|.......................................................................|
Router-B.........................................................Switch
|.......................................................................|
WiFi-B...........................................................Wired-A

NOTE: Ignore the dots, just fillers to stop vBulletin from collapsing the space.

Firewall and Router-A receive separate static ip's from our ISP. Router-A supplies WiFi-A and wired connection to all the desks. Router-B supplies WiFi-B.

Employees are distributed across WiFi-A, WiFi-B, Wired-A. Recently we been hit with daily network performance issues. Looking at ISP provided statistics page, shows we are hovering close to max bandwidth. Our employee count has not changed recently. We want to understand individual usage pattern.

Are there good free / low cost tools that will help understand individual usage:

1. Real time bandwidth monitor
2. Aggregate bandwidth consumption
3. Bandwidth consumed by activity (Browsing, Skype, File Transfer etc)

Basically need usage statistics of individual device connections without having to install some kind of software in each client device.

TIA

 

[azazel1024]

Some routers and some semi-managed and managed switches can do individual IP/MAC/port statistics on bandwidth. Likely means new hardware, unless your existing hardware supports it (or is an actual computer/server, then you could run bandwidth monitor software).

Another thing you could do, which is more trial and error, is if your routers support it, setup bandwidth controls to each IP and see what happens. Either that is the solution period, to prevent future abusers, or at least it might help you track down who the serial abuser is, because you'll see bandwidth across the router drop when you tamp down on one specific IP.

 

[JackMDS]

The typical solution is to Run a Real Server and distribute the whole traffic through it. Duing o will allow yo to collect the Data that you mentioned from one spot.

Otherwise, if you have good control over the Individual computer and they are configured with an Admin account that the employees can not access and futz around with, you can put individual software on each computer and collect the data through the Network.

Example - http://www.netlimiter.com/

 

[John Connor]

If your routers support SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) you could use a program that will use the data. I have used something called Wallwatcher, but it's really only a home use app.