Traffic and Bandwidth Monitoring

Monitoring network performance is a crucial point for a number of administrative tasks including:

  • Detecting, identifying, handling and preventing network problems
  • Finding inefficiencies and bottlenecks, performing load analysis, assure required quality of service
  • Recognizing traffic patterns and trends, planning network capacity.

Iotellect Network Manager supports two basic approaches to traffic and bandwidth usage monitoring:

SNMP-based Network Traffic and Bandwidth Usage Monitoring

Iotellect Network Manager can be configured to periodically poll network hosts via SNMP and obtain the following information about their network interfaces using ifTable SNMP variable:

  • total number of bytes received on and transmitted out of the interface
  • current bandwidth estimate (bits per second)
  • interface speed (maximum bandwidth)
  • number of packets that contained errors preventing them from being delivered
  • number of discarded packets.

Iotellect Network Manager uses these values to estimate interface traffic and bandwidth utilization. For devices with the ifTable available an Interface Traffic (interfaceTraffic) variable is created. It contains calculated values as described in the following table:

Field Name

Comment

Interface Name

Extracted from ifDescr field of ifTable.

Incoming Traffic, bps

Calculated as derivation of ifInOctets.

Outcoming Traffic, bps

Calculated as derivation of ifOutOctets.

Incoming Bandwidth Usage, %

Calculated as a ratio between Incoming Traffic and its interface speed (ifSpeed field).

Outgoing Bandwidth Usage, %

Calculated as a ratio between Outgoing Traffic and its interface speed (ifSpeed field).

You can review this information for a particular device executing this query, for example, in Query Executor:

SELECT * FROM users.*.devices.deviceContext:ifTable as data

(Substitute the deviceContext with the name of your device context.)

The network interface monitoring data can be visualized using, for example, the following out-of-the-box charts:

  • Interface Traffic Top 10 and Bandwidth Usage Top 10 charts

You can also see this data in table form using reports, namely:

Functional characteristics of individual interfaces on routers and switches can be used as to detect network problems. Iotellect Network Manager provides several alerts for that:

You can create custom tools for monitoring and analyzing activity of network interfaces.

Interface Traffic and Utilization Alerts

Alert Name

Triggering Condition

Notes

Network Interface Utilization (SNMP)

Incoming or outgoing bandwidth usage exceeds specified threshold.

Use Setup Monitoring Profile action, Network Interfaces group to create. Available for SNMP-compliant devices only.

Interface Traffic and Utilization Reports

Report/Query Class

Report/Query Name

Description

Interface Traffic

Interface Traffic Summary

Per-interface traffic summary (including incoming and outgoing traffic) for all devices

Interface Traffic Top 10

10 interfaces with maximum total traffic (sum of incoming and outgoing traffic)

Interface Traffic Top 50

50 interfaces with maximum total traffic (sum of incoming and outgoing traffic)

Interface Bandwidth Utilization

Interface Bandwidth Summary

Per-interface bandwidth summary for all devices

Interface Bandwidth Utilization Over 50%

Incoming and outgoing bandwidth usage percentages for devices with either of the values exceeding 50%

Interface Bandwidth Utilization Over 90%

Incoming and outgoing bandwidth usage percentages for interfaces with either of the values exceeding 90%

Interface Bandwidth Utilization Top 10

Incoming and outgoing bandwidth usage percentages for 10 interfaces with maximal total bandwidth usage

Interface Bandwidth Utilization Top 50

Incoming and outgoing bandwidth usage percentages for 50 interfaces with maximal total bandwidth usage

Interface Traffic, Utilization and Status Graphing

Chart Name

Description

Notes

Network Interface Traffic (SNMP)

Shows incoming and outgoing traffic of specified network interfaces.

The chart can be created for a particular SNMP-enabled context using Setup Monitoring Profile action.

Interface Traffic Top 10 (SNMP)

Presents network interfaces and corresponding devices with the greatest total (incoming and outgoing) traffic.

The chart is automatically created by a corresponding auto run action in Top 10 group and is available at Top 10 dashboard.

Interface Bandwidth Utilization Top 10

Presents network interfaces and corresponding devices with the greatest total (incoming and outgoing) bandwidth utilization percentage.

The chart is automatically created by a corresponding auto run action in Top 10 group and is available at Top 10 dashboard.

Network Interface Errors (SNMP)

Shows number of error packets. Error packets are inbound packets that contain errors preventing them from being deliverable to a higher-layer protocol.

The chart can be created for a particular SNMP-enabled context using Setup Monitoring Profile action.

Network Interface Discards (SNMP)

Diagrams number of discarded packets: inbound packets which were chosen to be discarded even though no errors had been detected to prevent their being deliverable to a higher-layer protocol. For example, if too many packets are received, and the protocol stack does not have enough resources to properly handle the packet, it may be discarded.

The chart can be created for a particular SNMP-enabled context using Setup Monitoring Profile action.

Interface Traffic Model

This model is attached to every network device. It declares per-interface in/out bytes counter table. This table is filled using 64-bit traffic counters if such counters are provided by the device, and 32-bit counters are used otherwise.

All other interface traffic analysis tools (charts, reports, etc.) are based on this model.

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