Re: [cobalt-users] Bandwidth measurement

[Kris Dahl <krislists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

on 6/20/00 5:06 PM, Andres Petralli at petralli@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

> Dear Cobalt Users,
> does anyone of you know a good piece of software that can be used
> to do bandwidth and transfer accounting? We are an ISP that offer
> Cobalt appliances for rent. Monthly prices are based on
> transfer-volumes. Of course, now we have to find a good solution
> on how to monitor traffic. This piece of software should be able
> to log to a plaintext file or maybe even directly into a
> database. If anyone of you has a good advice or even the name of
> a good application, we would be very glad to hear from you. I
> know there are a lot of other ISPs that have to do the same task,
> so, if you'd like to help us over here in Switzerland, we would
> be very glad.

The best method that I have seen without spending a lot of money on a 'real'
bandwidth management solution is as follows:

Purchase a switch like a Cisco 2920XL, HP Procurve 2424M or other 'managed'
switch that has support for SMTP, etc.  Then use a system like MRTG (Multi
router Traffic Grapher,
http://ee-staff.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/mrtg/mrtg.html).  Its a slick
system that can give you graphs and usage of each port, etc.  Then you are
able to charge for bandwidth by the port.  Works well.

-k