Usage Monitoring
Usage and Activity Monitoring
Usage monitoring is important to identify causes for bandwidth bottlenecks, that are not caused by faulty systems, but an excessive bandwidth usage by single servers or users. Usage monitoring software such PRTG Traffic Grapher analyze the traffic in your network and provide you with detailed information on usage and activity. The results of the usage monitoring can be total bandwidth (e.g. flowing through a port of a switch) or drilled down to protocolls.
You can configure Top Lists in PRTG Traffic Grapher to find out what applications or what servers use up your bandwidth.
When you set up a new NetFlow or Packet Sniffing sensor in PRTG the following three Toplists are created automatically:
- Top Talkers
- Top Connections
- Top Protocols
This covers the most basic needs for usage monitoring,
but you can also edit the three toplists or create additional ones. Further information on editing Toplists can be found here.
When working with Toplists for usage monitoring be aware that privacy issues can come up for certain configurations of this feature since you monitor IP addresses of users. Using Toplists you can track all single connections of an individual PC to the outside world and you, as the administrator, must make sure that it is legal for you to configure PRTG like this.
How to Configure Top Lists For Usage Monitoring
In order to discern excessive usage based on IP address you can set up usage monitoring based on Top Lists as follows:
- Configure the device(s) in case to send a copy of all network packets to the IP of the machine running PRTG
- Create one new Packet Sniffer / Netflow Collector sensor for each PC to be monitored and apply a filter based on the MAC address or IP of each PC you want to monitor
- Or: If you do not need long term accounting data for each PC and only want to know the current and recent traffic by IP, you can create just one Packet Sniffer sensor and enable the Toplist feature based on IP.
Note: If you have several switches/routers you may not see all traffic if you only monitor one device.
Once
the relevant sensors are defined, you can recognize bandwidth usage
either by comparing the individual sensor data or by monitoring the top
list entries. Top lists also include a trend entry allowing to
determine, at a glance, what machines / users are using more / less
bandwidth than in prior scans. Furthermore, top lists will include
listings of visited IP addresses (optionally, DNS (Domain Name System, DNS servers resolve server names into the actual IP address of the server) resolution can be turned on in the top list settings), as such allowing
to determine what machine / user accessed what server / web site.
Note:
In order to monitor network traffic by IP address or protocol used by a
shared Internet connection or leased line, please select filtering to
exclude LAN IP addresses.
Click on the following links for further information on filters and protocols regarding usage monitoring.
Free Usage Monitoring
You can setup usage monitoring with PRTG Traffic Grapher for free or test the capabilities of usage monitoring with the 30-Day-Trial-Edition. The Freeware Edition is completely free for personal and commercial use and may be downloaded at no cost. The Commercial Editions are required if you want to monitor more than ten sensors. Licenses for our usage monitoring software start at $295 / €195.