sundance-communications.com/forum Forums VOIP Phones & IP PBX Networking Best method to monitor T1 througput on network

Looking for any suggestions on how to best monitor connection speeds from our cisco rtr over our T1 uplink.

I'm thinking about maybe setting up MRTG...Any ideas how to test speed directly on the rtr that connects to the T?

Here is the actual command on a 3845. The txload 1/255, rxload 1/255, mean that there is no traffic on this circuit. 128/255 is 50% usage. MRTG is a great product if you know how to setup LINUX. There are also VMs for Cacti which is great. Solarwinds also has a "speedometeror dashboard" monitor. You just set the SNMP string.

show interface Serial0/2/0:3


Serial0/2/0:3 is up, line protocol is up
Hardware is GTxxK Serial
Description: DHECxxx
MTU 1500 bytes, BW 1536 Kbit, DLY 20000 usec,
reliability 255/255, txload 1/255, rxload 1/255
Encapsulation PPP, LCP Open, multilink Open
Link is a member of Multilink bundle Multilink1, loopback not set
Keepalive set (10 sec)
CRC checking enabled
Last input 00:00:00, output 00:00:00, output hang never
Last clearing of "show interface" counters 1w1d
Input queue: 0/75/0/0 (size/max/drops/flushes); Total output drops: 0
Queueing strategy: weighted fair [suspended, using FIFO]
FIFO output queue 0/40, 0 drops
5 minute input rate 3000 bits/sec, 6 packets/sec
5 minute output rate 4000 bits/sec, 6 packets/sec
33510392 packets input, 2050922364 bytes, 0 no buffer
Received 0 broadcasts, 0 runts, 1 giants, 0 throttles
1 input errors, 1 CRC, 0 frame, 0 overrun, 0 ignored, 0 abort
32678242 packets output, 3847915855 bytes, 0 underruns
0 output errors, 0 collisions, 4294967295 interface resets
0 output buffer failures, 0 output buffers swapped out
2 carrier transitions

Awesome!!! That is a BIG help. I had looked in their w/sho int, but i couldn't remember how to read it and thought it was a different cmd. SWEET!

Yeah I'm trying to get MRTG right now. Tried loading it on Windows and it hasn't gone well yet. Hopefully will have a Linux box soon.

If you get it in the form a VM Ware Appliance you can run it off of Winders. Here is Cacti which is sort of MRTG on steriods as an appliance give it a try. https://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/892

Any idea how much bandwidth MRTG uses up? I've been looking, maybe I'm just missing, but I'm not seeing any hard # on how much it actually uses...? If we are already practically fully utilizing our T1 at certain times, is the MRTG traffic enough to crash it?

Minimal. If you are monitoring the ingress of a T1 there would be no additional overhead. If you are monitoring across the T1 then you would see some overhead. He you ever classified the traffic on your network? Go into the interface and enable NBAR.

conf t

int s0/0:0
ip nbar protocol-discovery

exit

This will turn on the routers internal QoS classification mechanism and look all the way up to layer 7. After this do a sh ip nbar protocol-d top 10 to show the top 10 protocols traversing the interface and how much data. This will give you and idea of what is using what. It does now break it down into individual devices but does break it down into percentages. This is the first step in setting up QoS. It will show you how much SNMP traffic MRTG is using.