Hi Guys,

Can you please suggest a monitoring tools/software/applications for logging the top users of bandwidth in your network. Open-source, windows or linux Based is ok with me. I believe I there were some users in our company that is abusing our bandwidth causing poor network response to company network, and I want to take action on that.

Thanks in advance!

regards, Kninedawg

SolarWinds's Orion NTA (NetFlow Traffic Analyzer) might be a good place to start. I'd also use it to search for open-source alternatives.

ManageEngine also has a NetFlow 7 product, and there is a free version too.

Search, and you will find many, many, more.

If the traffic you want to monitor is going through an ASA or Cisco router then NetFlow is an option. The Scrutinizer product from Plixer is very good and their support is great too. You can download a fully functioning demo of Scrutinizer and it will continue to work after expiration but some features may be stripped out. My company elected to buy it after our eval since the support was great and the product worked really well.

If you have a router running IOS 15 then NBAR based application recognition is available in the newer 'Flexible' NetFlow export and allows Scrutinizer to gain further visibility into the traffic (just implementing this now so I'm not fully up to speed on this aspect but it looks interesting).

If you run Plixer's SNMP product (Denika) alongside Scrutinizer then you can build a nice network map with bandwidth usage displayed on the links between devices monitored by NetFlow or SNMP. Denika's interface seems like it is due for an overhaul but I've found it to be very useful especially in combination with the Scrutinizer map I described.

If you using Cisco router, it already have top-talker function. You can look at 10 or 20 top-talker. What you need to do is to enable it. for more information, go to http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/ios/netflow/configuration/guide/cfg_nflow_top_talk.html.

However, if you want to keep historic view of the flow, you need an external collector to export to. Currently, I am using nfsen, open source. It is pretty easy to install and use.