If you have a requirement to measure the bandwidth utilisation across various parts of your campus network then you could do a lot worse than implement a OpenSource product called Multi Route Traffic Grapher (MRTG)
Using the SNMP protocol to poll devices such as switches on your network it gather statistical information and generates informative graphs on network usage. That can also be used to help diagnosing intermittent network problems. With further configuration it can be used to record database usage or track processor temperatures.
The information is presented in HTML format on a local web server so is therefore accessible with a common browser.
The whole product and documentation is freely downloadable from the site:
MRTG Implementation Manual pdf download (Thanks to Florin Prunoiu Enterastream Communication Inc.)
Although MRTG is very configurable an example of the graphs generated are shown here.
In this example throughput is seen to rise dramatically in the afternoon.
If you would like further information or assistance in implementing MRTG on your site please contact Mark Clark at the RSC.
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