Network Interface Counter/What would it mean?

I'm looking through some records for performance monitor for our 6 servers here at work and I'm having problems understanding why my boss would monitor Network Interface(3Com EtherLink PCI)\Bytes Received/sec and Interface(3Com EtherLink PCI)\Bytes Sent/sec.

The max for both of these was .8meg and we have about 50 end users. He is not one to Monitor something unless it is very important. He asked me to go through it and tell me what I thought, and I can't think of what that would tell him/me about the system. Anyone out there smarter then me?!
Thanks

Kn1ght the Confused.

could he be planning to implement load balancing by installing another NIC ? probably why one may monitor an NIC for traffic load ...

can anyone explain more about load balancing?
how it can be done using a virtual IP ?

chrs,
Syed

Are both the NICs in the same system, in which case it can't be a load balancer (you balance load by distributing between different systems ). For example when you connect to microsoft or yahoo, you may think you're connecting to one site or one IP, but that IP is the IP of the load balancer which then assigns the request to a particular server either on a round robin basis, or depending on the number of requests each server is servicing.

To me it sounds more likely that your boss wants you to see something specific in the traffic history.. are there any sudden spikes in traffic at times when there shouldn't be traffic, or the opposite -- dips in traffic when you should have had more traffic.

Its really difficult to tell what he wants you to see.

load balancing as in Link Aggregation or NIC teaming ... its done on two or more NICs of the same system ... i'm trying to learn more about this ... sounds interesting ... its an IEEE 802.3ad standard ... you sorta team up all the NICs of the same machine together and give it a virtual ip and the system recognizes this setup as one network interface .... it sort of provides redundancy and load balancing for the NICs and i think gives some extra bandwidth as well but deffinately not a load balancer for the server itself like ..... ahem ahem .... microsoft or yahoo sites :lol:

here are a few quick links :

h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/networking/teaming.html

www.vmware.com/pdf/esx2_NIC_Teaming.pdf

www.syskonnect.com/syskonnect/technology/wp-lag_e.pdf

www.itworld.com/Net/1750/NWW001113tech/


chrs,
Syed

I haven't checked out the links yet, but I don't understand how having two NICs in the same machine will balance anything.... other than additional bandwidth......

<rant>You've caught me in a bad mood... ever tried writing a network sniffer from scratch and then writing the function to decode the packets from raw bytes into something useful, with only 3 hours of sleep, and nothing to eat for the last 10 hours......... ?

And then windows started broadcasting its dirty NetBIOS traffic with 0x80 0x60 in the ethernet type field, and everything hung...

I'll laugh about this tomorrow morning.
</rant>