I am interested in offering dedicated servers to my customers. I currently have some servers co-located at a local data center on a T1 line.

How do you monitor the traffic for each dedicated server? For example, if I am going to offer 200gig of traffic for a dedicated server, how will I know if that server exceeds the limit?

Is there some sort of appliance I can install at the datacenter to monitor this?

Also how do you monitor the traffic for shared accounts on a Windows 2000 server? Is there someftware that will email the customer if they are about to exceed the limits?

For dedicated servers, you can either setup MRTG to poll the switch or install it on the server. There are other tools, but the easiest is MRTG.

URL : http://www.mrtg.org

-Shazad

mrtg.org....i always wondered how they made those graphs...thanks

Funny you mention MRTG, just installed this on a box today :D

You may want to check out bwmgr at http://www.etinc.com for pretty affordable and reliable bandwidth management. It reports 95th percentile, gb transferred, and can do rate limiting very elegantly.

It paid for itself in one day at our facility.

I heard really really bad things about the owner of etinc.com.

Sure you should not believe everything you hear but it's more then one complaint. Specific problems were with support after the sale...

If you've dealt with enough admins, developers, programmers, especially smart ones, you'll tend to find that many of them are real primadonnas. IMHO, the way I read it before buying, etinc's pre-purchase disclaimer is along the lines of "if you're not buying our full-service package, don't expect full-service support."

Kinda like web hosting, eh? Think about $5/mo accounts from a bottom-feeder provider versus $500/mo accounts with a premium provider... When paying $5/mo, what are people expecting to get? Someone to edit their mail aliases? Install software updates? Probably not. If someone was paying you $500, though, you'd probably be a lot more lenient with support terms.

Buy the turnkey solution from etinc, and you'll get a lot more attention and hand-holding, of which you probably won't need any because it's a turnkey product. If you've got geeks on staff and you're cheap, get the software package alone and install on your own hardware. Either way, bwmgr pays for itself superpronto, a lot lot lot faster than their competition does.

George