Folks, I'm interested in learning which tools other people are using to measure bandwidth usage for co-located client machines on Ethernet switches. For now I've cobbled together some crude software to regularly read SNMP port byte in/out counters from our switches, stashing the deltas in a DB for later reporting/analysis. I'm concerned that the data is misleading, though, in that it will include LAN broadcast traffic. Also, customers end up paying for other bandwidth that they did not want or induce, like network scans, etc. (tough luck?). We've considered implementing unique customer VLANS to separate customer broadcast domains, but it seems like that'd be a pain, would eat up IP addresses, and possibly tax our routers with all of the ISL/VLAN stuff? Thanks in advance for any help/hints/pointers/advice you can offer. Regards, --dmr David Ramsey Charlotte, NC
On Wed, 26 Jul 2000, David M. Ramsey wrote:
For now I've cobbled together some crude software to regularly read SNMP port byte in/out counters from our switches, stashing the deltas in a DB for later reporting/analysis.
We do about the same thing, but we store absolute byte counts, relative byte counts from the last measurement, and figure the kb/s; we also store AdminStatus and OperStatus for SLA purposes.
I'm concerned that the data is misleading, though, in that it will include LAN broadcast traffic. Also, customers end up paying for other bandwidth that they did not want or induce, like network scans, etc. (tough luck?).
Exactly, tough. If they use the bandwidth, then they should pay for the bandwidth.
We've considered implementing unique customer VLANS to separate customer broadcast domains, but it seems like that'd be a pain, would eat up IP addresses, and possibly tax our routers with all of the ISL/VLAN stuff?
We do that; it's unwise to have everyone on the same VLAN, as some others have demonstrated.
Alex wrote:
On Wed, 26 Jul 2000, David M. Ramsey wrote:
We've considered implementing unique customer VLANS to separate customer broadcast domains, but it seems like that'd be a pain, would eat up IP addresses, and possibly tax our routers with all of the ISL/VLAN stuff?
We do that; it's unwise to have everyone on the same VLAN, as some others have demonstrated.
We do that as well (but different environment). We have a 5500 with NFFC-II cards for layer-3 "switching" and feed a 7505 over 2FEIP cards by fast etherchannel ISL trunks. Routes IP/IPX between over a dozen VLANs without blinking. A 4500M with FEIP can do quite a few as well, but doesn't support portchannel. Jeff Kell <jeff-kell@utc.edu>
At 7/26/00 -0400, Alex wrote:
On Wed, 26 Jul 2000, David M. Ramsey wrote:
For now I've cobbled together some crude software to regularly read SNMP port byte in/out counters from our switches, stashing the deltas in a DB for later reporting/analysis.
We do about the same thing, but we store absolute byte counts, relative byte counts from the last measurement, and figure the kb/s; we also store AdminStatus and OperStatus for SLA purposes.
I'm concerned that the data is misleading, though, in that it will include LAN broadcast traffic. Also, customers end up paying for other bandwidth that they did not want or induce, like network scans, etc. (tough luck?).
Exactly, tough. If they use the bandwidth, then they should pay for the bandwidth.
Depending on which switch you're using, you can also poll the switch for broadcast and multicast on the port and subtract that from the total so you don't bill for that. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Paul Froutan Email: pfroutan@rackspace.com Rackspace Managed Hosting <http://www.rackspace.com>
At 03:36 PM 7/26/2000 -0500, Paul Froutan wrote:
Depending on which switch you're using, you can also poll the switch for broadcast and multicast on the port and subtract that from the total so you don't bill for that.
Does anyone actually do this? I thought everyone accounted for all traffic on the port. Of course, the customer ends up paying some extra, but the traffic did go over your network, and if you did not have the equipment, bandwidth, etc., to handle it, the customer's "real" bits would not get through. This is true even of customers with multiple links to the same provider who talk between machines in their own network over the provider's switch. (Of course, the customer can easily solve that with a tiny bit of clue - and fortunately for most colo providers' bottom lines, most customers do not have even that much clue. :)
Paul Froutan Email:
TTFN, patrick
participants (5)
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Alex -
David M. Ramsey -
Jeff Kell -
Patrick W. Gilmore -
Paul Froutan