[SoCoSA/discuss] network bandwidth usage monitoring

[Sean]

Happy new year everyone!

For awhile now I've been trying to find a good way to monitor the
total bandwidth usage on virtual servers and other systems on my
network. Thanks to all of your help, I now have snmp working which
makes this much easier for me.

Does anyone have a program that you like which provides total
bandwidth used? I can't seem to find anything that gathers this data.
I may use what you suggest in conjunction with Munin depending on what
data it collects.

I've tried cacti, but for some reason I can't seem to resolve SQL
problems despite multiple re-installs and database re-creation. I
suspect there's a problem with the software, as the developer insists
that the problem is due to a corrupted database.

As I mentioned, I've gotten Munin to work, but it does not have the
ability to provide me with total bandwidth used (i.e. Gigabytes of
traffic per month), and can only give me bandwith as in Kilobytes per
second (which will still prove useful) with current/min/max/average
values. Aside from this it is excellent for viewing historical
resource usage of virtual servers, as it gives you data on virtually
everything else. I need to be able to collect data with as little
control over the virtual server as possible, and monitoring via
ipchains is more invasive/manual that I'd prefer.

I only have a handful of hosts/servers to monitor at the moment, and I
don't foresee needing to monitor more than a couple dozen over the
next year or so.

Thanks!

Sean