The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 4 (of 5) - Determining bandwidth requirements

Determining bandwidth requirements

I'm looking for a method of determining the network bandwidth requirements for an application that my company has developed. The application is a client/server one, that is used on a LAN. The only tools that I am able to find by googling utilize the SNMP capabilities of a router to get the bandwidth info, which is not applicable in my case.

Can anyone help me find a tool or method for determining this?

One method I've thought of would be to create a filter in a sniffer (e.g. Ethereal) that would capture only traffic being used by my application (in my case it would include DCOM traffic (TCP and UDP?) along with MSSQL communication and some additional traffic on another port). Then I would need to analyze the traffic captured to find the amount of packets exchanged per second and peak number of bytes. Unfortunately, I don't know how to do this with Ethereal captured packets, or even if it is possible; from what I can gather this is not information that is readily available in the captures.

It seems strange to me that there aren't a dozen such software solutions for sale that leapt out at me when I did my searches. The need for this information is quite common, I think; I know that I've needed this info in the past regarding other products that I've been involved in… Is this an idea for a great new product? Or am I just overlooking the obvious? ;-)

Thanks!

ICBW
Monday, February 16, 2004

NetLimiter, http://www.netlimiter.com/ .

Oren
Monday, February 16, 2004

Graph traffic with mrtg, but leave yourself a fair bit of overhead.

For example, I know 1 meg lines which are generally (99% of the time) using 10% of it, however when you do need it all, you notice.

fw
Monday, February 16, 2004

Thanks a lot for the suggestions so far.

Taking the lead of mrtg, I can see that I will probably still need to get the packet traffic data from SNMP. Can anyone point me to a relatively painless resource that will help me set up the MIBs needed to monitor LAN network traffic on various ports in a W2K domain?

Thanks again!

ICBW
Monday, February 16, 2004