How do you monitor bandwidth

So my job is becoming more and more about controlling and monitoring bandwidth, and I don't seem to have the tools to do it.

Checking the speed of our internet connection is pretty easy... Lots and lots of sites for that. BUT.

How dose everyone monitor/check bandwidth internally? I'm just using FTP, but there has to be a better way. Possible something with a user friendly output I can show to department heads who don't know beans about networking...???

Thanks for any help.

I use Cacti since it has pretty graphs. It comes in Unix and windows flavors.

www.cacti.net/

I would use some type of SNMP/NetFlow software. There are plenty free Linux-based solutions or something commercial like What's Up Gold.

Nagios and Zenoss are linux based monitoring tools.

I recently tried "PRTG Traffic Grapher":

www.paessler.com/prtg/

There is a freeware edition. Looks rich.

Some good stuff for monitoring. But I need a solution that will push data also. I have to do a good deal of my work in the off hours when there is almost no "native" data traveling on the networks.

www.dslreports.com/speedtest

pushes data and shows me how fast its going. What I really need is something like that but for different points in my networks, and customer networks.

So you want something that will actually transfer data from one computer to another?

Look into traffic generators...

What exactly are you trying to do? You want to schedule a time in which data is sent over the line and the speed is recorded?