Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Colocation and Data Centers : Dedicated bandwidth monitoring

[CSevey]

Been a while sense I've visited here...

I just got access to a new rack in a datacenter and was toying with the idea of offering colo services. Was wondering how you keep track of bandwidth usage?

Obviously there are switches out there capable of doing this (but they are expensive I'm sure). You could force them to install a script or enable snmp, is this ever done?

Any insight?

Thanks,

CSevey

[snickn]

Most people use MRTG with switches which are SNMP compatible. Any switch that isn't SNMP capable, it would be safe to say, probably shouldn't be on your network

[CSevey]

Thanks, an additional $400 SNMP switch is a lot cheaper then that $3000 cisco switch I was looking at.

Havn't looked into the software yet, but my guess is this route I would have to sell by the GB, not bandwidth. Because it's only going to monitor the bandwith past the switch. Unlike the cisco switch which you can put a cap on each port.

CSevey

[snickn]

Don't forget to consider quality as a factor too, I'm sure your colocation customers will be very impressed with your $400 netgear layer2 only switch, however I'd recommend a $2k-3k Cisco 2948 instead

[CSevey]

Hmmm... maybe I'll wait it out a bit, and splurge for the cisco. Seems like more and better options that way. Now go over and check out my user mode question and answer that one.

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showth...hreadid=199008

Thanks for your input.

Cheers,

CSevey

[THW-Dave]

We love our fleet of HP ProCurve 2524's they are the top of their class. and half the price of the competitors.

MRTG polling via SNMP is the way to go.

[Papa Smurff]

I agree. The HP Procurve series supports SNMP and some of the Procurve models are priced well. When you buy it they also come with HP networking software (forgot the name but kinda like a watered down version of HP Openview) and lets you monitor individual ports and even config per port policy all through a clean little web GUI. Pretty graphs for viewing historical data and even the ability to sniff top network talkers/hosts. You can even set alert notification is certain thresholds are exceeded.

I'm more of a Cisco guy simply because they have the largest vendor support and more choices than most of their competitors.

But any large name company usually spends millions of dollars each year on Research and Development to make sure the product is good.

[s.h.a.zz.y]

I believe the HP are based on the Foundry switching gear.
Take a look at the "Foundry FastIron FWS24" - EOL'd but decent switches ~400 on ebay.

[jkca]

Take a look at RTG at http://rtg.sourceforge.net/ it operates much faster than MRTG and gives you the ability to make 95th percentile reports for billing.

[tccoggs]

If you want to do GB based billing check out IOG on Sourceforge, it graphs input and output usages based on GB of transfer.

[xisp]

Originally posted by CSevey
Thanks, an additional $400 SNMP switch is a lot cheaper then that $3000 cisco switch I was looking at.

Havn't looked into the software yet, but my guess is this route I would have to sell by the GB, not bandwidth. Because it's only going to monitor the bandwith past the switch. Unlike the cisco switch which you can put a cap on each port.

CSevey

It's not uncommon to describe a connection as being "512kbps is burstable to 100mbps" meaning, pretty much, 150GB per month.. It is confusing though

alex

[wubwob]

Originally posted by snickn
Don't forget to consider quality as a factor too, I'm sure your colocation customers will be very impressed with your $400 netgear layer2 only switch, however I'd recommend a $2k-3k Cisco 2948 instead

We use cisco 2950's as "edge" switches as they say.
We go for the ones with the EI image and not the SI - weve picked these up for £500-600 each.