How do you monitor bandwidth

Let me back up a min...

My department manages all kinds of core and distribution networking. For internal and external customers. We will often be called and asked to verify speeds and connectivity. In that respect something exactly like the DSL reports speed test's software would be nice. Put it on one laptop(or server) then hit it from another laptop...

so I guess i'm looking for a traffic generators that monitors results.

Hope that makes sense.

T

That does make sense. I did do some research on traffic generators and found a great deal of them (google); however, I have not taken the time to used any of them yet so I am not sure how well they can report. You may want to look into them on your own if nobody else has any experience with them...

I found a whole bunch of them too, just took a while to find exactly what to look for... Now to try a few out and see which one sticks.


Maybe I'll end up being the guy who knows about that stuff... hehe...


T

Let's hope so! I will have to look into them soon as well. Let me know what you find and I will do the same.

I've done this sort of thing before with traffic generators and measuring the transfer between PCs. The big thing to remeber is that every transport mechanism introduces an overhed. What you need to do is try out various traffic generation methods, transfer methods and software/PC combinations to get the maximum throughput you can achieve on a test network (say both devices back-to-back in a good switch on the bench). That's the maximum throughput you can achieve/measure. Then when you repeat the test in a real environment if you get lower throughput you can give a definitive answer knowing your test method isn't the limiting factor. If you get the same, you'll still be able to say "the bandwidth is at least x".

Do you have any specific traffic generators that you would recommend?